Today we had a great discussion about connectivity amongst devices – a concept known as “The Internet of Things.”
A quote of interest from the “Embedded, Everywhere” reading: “An EmNet that requires extensive user training will have failed in its fundamental promise—computing systems must adapt to users, not the other way around.” (emphasis added)
Is this (or has this always been) a hard and fast rule? I may be wrong, but there seems to be some irony here. As the ARPANET was being built just 50+ years ago, the onus was placed on scientists (the users) to create software that would adapt their own local machines to IMPs which would then connect to the overall network – in order to connect, they had to adapt. Now, according to this article, we expect our computerized consumer electronics (which house EmNets) to be easy to use and, ideally, intuitively adaptable to us.
Waski’s Wired article suggests that interconnected sensors are practically living, working together as a single “organism.” I found this comment related to Licklider’s original idea of the computer as an almost human entity. Licklider died in 1990; it makes you wonder what he’d think if only he were around to see the changes over the past 26 years.
Finally, to take Burrus’ thought (about the Internet of Things being far larger than we realize) a step further: Smart Cities connect to other Smart Cities, States connect to States, and all of America is then connected and then…? How big could this possibly get? A central command hub in the White House that monitors all 50 states? The implications are pretty neat; for example, sensors could assess natural disaster damage across multiple states and decide where first to send responders based on which areas were most harmed. How would national responses to Hurricane Sandy or Katrina have differed had we had this type of technology in place? (At the same time, the national security implications of a central command hub are also pretty alarming.)
I like the connections that you’re making across the weeks! Excellent work! A couple of thoughts on your thoughts.
Starting at the end, I personally think that our government’s response in the case of a hurricane will change only if the sensor data are publicly available. If only a few know what the sensors are saying, it remains too easy for politics to intrude. Politics are important, but I hope they’re weighed against other factors and not viewed as the only factor.
Your emphasized quote comes from the fact that those who build IoT solutions want the solution to be invisible to the user. If this is the starting assumption, then it makes sense to say that the computing systems should adapt to the users, and not the other way around. Reading into your skepticism, I would agree that most of the time it is the other way around. Even in today’s world for technologies that are supposed to be easy to use (e.g., those that come from Apple), we find ourselves changing our behaviors even with these products. Human beings adapt their behavior all the time to new environments. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. It’s probably better if the IoT community was explicit about those behaviors that are meant to remain rather than saying no behavior will change.