Over at “The Platform”, Cisco’s Dave Evans has posted a great infographic showing that communicating things—essentially embedded sensors —have already outstripped the number of communicating homo sapiens.
That happened in 2010.
By 2050 there will be 50 billion such devices—think coffee makers, cars, trains, refrigerators, gas pumps—that will be notifying and texting each other across the Internet.
Humans are involved in the loop, but only tangentially.
The example given in the chart describes an Internet-enabled alarm clock automatically going into a snooze mode and a coffee maker with its own TCP/IP stack delaying its brewing cycle because of an online meeting that was pushed back. Your car then decides to delay its ice-defrosting as well—it was cold last night.
The gadgets all got together, exchanged tweets, and made decisions based on some default configuration rules, or assuming the household had a particularly precocious child, human-crafted if-then scripts.
It sounds all very Jetson to me.
Left out from the scenario is the malicious hacker that sent out a bit of malware that changed the meeting time.
Malware then spreads virally causing all of America to be late for work.
Related articles
- The Internet of Things [INFOGRAPHIC] (cisco.com)
