*This is a swell article, because it's a grand synthesizing paradigm about the Internet of Things, and I don't believe any of it. Wirelessly hooking up every possible object, and then automating their functions through "elaborate interactions," is cyber-voodoo. It doesn't make any design sense to make "smart things" "talk" laterally and autonomously to other "smart things." They're not "smart," and they don't have much to talk about.
*Even if you add 'em all together in a vast message queuing service, they're not gonna become a good programmable platform, any more than a bunch of electronic toasters are gonna spontaneously unite into a Singularity.
*When you're sticking sensors and actuators on stuff for the sheer tinkerly joy of it, you're not doing the "Internet of Things," you're doing the "Internet of Toys." Now, I quite like the Internet of Toys. I don't want to dismiss the creative people who are gleefully exploring those functionalities, but that's not a genuine industrial-scale internet-of-things. It's not a programmable world, a smart planet, an augmented ubiquity, a noosphere, none of that. It's a bunch of hacker dudes sticking sensors and actuators on stuff while they kinda hope that the instrumented "things" will figure out all the hard stuff all by themselves. It's like thinking that your toaster and your blender will become your Lazyweb and solve your tech issues for you.
*I don't find that prospect plausible.
*I'm still gonna watch with great interest though, because at least it will be entertaining.
https://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/internet-of-things/
(...)
"In this future, the intelligence once locked in our devices now flows into the universe of physical objects. Technologists have struggled to name this emerging phenomenon. Some have called it the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet—despite the fact that most of these devices aren’t actually on the Internet directly but instead communicate through simple wireless protocols. Other observers, paying homage to the stripped-down tech embedded in so many smart devices, are calling it the Sensor Revolution.
"But here’s a better way to think about what we’re building: It’s the Programmable World. After all, what’s remarkable about this future isn’t the sensors, nor is it that all our sensors and objects and devices are linked together. It’s the fact that once we get enough of these objects onto our networks, they’re no longer one-off novelties or data sources but instead become a coherent system, a vast ensemble that can be choreographed, a body that can dance. Really, it’s the opposite of an “Internet,” a term that even today—in the era of the cloud and the app and the walled garden—connotes a peer-to-peer system in which each node is equally empowered. By contrast, these connected objects will act more like a swarm of drones, a distributed legion of bots, far-flung and sometimes even hidden from view but nevertheless coordinated as if they were a single giant machine.
"For the Programmable World to reach its full potential, we need to pass through three stages. The first is simply the act of getting more devices onto the network—more sensors, more processors in everyday objects, more wireless hookups to extract data from the processors that already exist. The second is to make those devices rely on one another, coordinating their actions to carry out simple tasks without any human intervention. The third and final stage, once connected things become ubiquitous, is to understand them as a system to be programmed, a bona fide platform that can run software in much the same manner that a computer or smartphone can. Once we get there, that system will transform the world of everyday objects into a designable environment, a playground for coders and engineers. It will change the whole way we think about the division between the virtual and the physical. This might sound like a scary encroachment of technology, but the Programmable World could actually let us put more of our gadgets away, automating activities we normally do by hand and putting intelligence from the cloud into everything we touch...."
