schneier | The Internet of Things is the name given to the computerization of
everything in our lives. Already you can buy Internet-enabled
thermostats, light bulbs, refrigerators, and cars. Soon everything will
be on the Internet: the things we own, the things we interact with in
public, autonomous things that interact with each other.
These "things" will have two separate parts. One part will be sensors
that collect data about us and our environment. Already our smartphones
know our location and, with their onboard accelerometers, track our
movements. Things like our thermostats and light bulbs will know who is
in the room. Internet-enabled street and highway sensors will know how
many people are out and about -- and eventually who they are. Sensors
will collect environmental data from all over the world.
The other part will be actuators. They'll affect our environment. Our
smart thermostats aren't collecting information about ambient
temperature and who's in the room for nothing; they set the temperature
accordingly. Phones already know our location, and send that information
back to Google Maps and Waze to determine where traffic congestion is;
when they're linked to driverless cars, they'll automatically route us
around that congestion. Amazon already wants autonomous drones to
deliver packages. The Internet of Things will increasingly perform
actions for us and in our name.
Increasingly, human intervention will be unnecessary. The sensors
will collect data. The system's smarts will interpret the data and
figure out what to do. And the actuators will do things in our world.
You can think of the sensors as the eyes and ears of the Internet, the
actuators as the hands and feet of the Internet, and the stuff in the
middle as the brain. This makes the future clearer. The Internet now
senses, thinks, and acts.
We're building a world-sized robot, and we don't even realize it.
I've started calling this robot the World-Sized Web.
0 comments:
Post a Comment