The Internet of Things (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series)

This book offers a futuristic glimpse into a world that promises to alter our lives faster and more profoundly than any technology in history. It paints a picture of a very technology-centric world and provides a guided tour through the emerging Internet of Things (IoT).

The IoT originated from personal computers and the internet, ushering in global communications on a personal level, but the impact of mobility (mobile phones, cloud computing, social media and big data), created a conceptual and practical framework to support a connected world. It offers the ability to tag physical objects and transform users of smart phones into potential data sources. Thus, datasets are available, but the challenge is to identify the right data and put these sets to use effectively. Expectations are that mobile devices will become even smarter to create more intelligence in the device, changing it from a phone into a multifunctional computer that transforms how we exist. Risk factors are huge and are particularly acute in areas such as industrial machinery, health care and transportation, where people’s lives, health and welfare are important.

The “Industrial Internet” is the companion idea, considered to be the heart of IoT, which pulls together technology and processes from, big data, machine learning and M2M connectivity. Value from data are extracted through connected devices to provide feedback for making decisions, with data scientists building the best possible models, using predictive analytics to identify or understand an event before it occurs. Such systems may use machine or artificial intelligence to automate processes and decisions, taking humans out of the loop to produce speed and efficiency gains that can radically redefine business, education and government.

Applications in consumer technology are evolving that may cause major obstacles in the acceptance of protocols and standards, where clear policies for managing data governance and other legal issues are needed if the vast economic and practical potential of the IoT are to be realized. Building better sensors is a way forward, but the biggest challenge will be in building smart systems that can accumulate data, sort it instantly, validate results for specific context, and provide connected systems that work in the real world. Major questions on security and confidentiality, plus a high level of reliability, safety and trust will be needed where humans are involved.

The IoT is reaching a critical threshold of usability and practicality, but the industrial internet needs to reach a level of dependability that fosters trust. A new frontier of technology is taking shape that introduces a way to monitor, measure and understand the perpetual motion of the world and the things we do. Data gathered may provide deep insights into physical relationships, human behaviour and even the physics of our planet and universe, but we will be living in a world where almost everything is monitored, recorded and analysed. This will have huge privacy implications, on politics, social structure and laws. Are we engineering our own obsolescence where we have smart systems and dumb people?