People are colossally underestimating the Internet of Things. It’s not about alarm clocks that start your coffee maker, or about making more “things” talk to each other on a global network. The IoT will fundamentally alter how humans interact with the physical world, and will ultimately register as more significant than the Internet itself.
The major technical components
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Universal Daemonization will give every object (humans, businesses, cars, furniture) a bi-directional digital interface that serves as a representation of itself. These interfaces will broadcast information about the object, as well as provide interaction points for others. Human objects will display their favorite books, where they grew up, etc. for read-only information, and they’ll have /connect interfaces for people to link up professionally, to request a date, or to digitally flirt if within 50 meters, etc. Businesses will have APIs for displaying menus, allergy information if it’s a restaurant, an /entertainment interface so TV channels will change when people walk into a sports bar, and a /climate interface for people to request a temperature increase if they’re cold.
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Personal Assistants will consume these services for you, letting you know what you should know about your surroundings based on your preferences, which you’ve either given it explicitly or it’s learned over time. They’ll also interact with the environment on your behalf, based on your preferences, to make the world more to your liking. So they’ll order a water when you sit down to eat at a restaurant, send a coffee request (and payment) to the barista as you walk into your favorite coffee shop, and raise the temperature in any build you walk into because it knows you have a cold.
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Digital Reputation will be conveyed for humans through their daemons and federated ID. Through a particular identity tied to our real self, our professional skills, our job history, our buying power, our credit worthiness—will all be continuously updated and validated through a tech layer that works off of karma exchanges with other entities. If you think someone is trustworthy, or you like the work they do, or you found them hilarious during a dinner party, you’ll be able to say this about them in a way that sticks to them (and their daemon) for others to see. It’ll be possible to hide these comments, but most will be discouraged from doing so by social pressure.
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Augmented Reality will enable us to see the world with various filters for quality. So if I want to see only funny people around me, I can tell Siri, “Show me the funniest people in the room.”, and 4 people will light up with a green outline. You can do the same for the richest, or the tallest, or the people who grew up in the same city as you. You’ll be able to do the same when looking for the best restaurants or coffee shops as you walk down an unfamiliar street.
I mostly agree…but when? For the pointer I thank @elbowspeak.
I notice that the article does not mention security or the possibility of hacking
the Internet of Things. The potential negatives are greater for the IOT than
for the regular ‘net.
Bingo – that first point should read ‘Universal Daemonization will give every object (humans, businesses, cars, furniture) a bi-directional digital interface that serves as an attack surface of itself.’ And Stuxnet, a no longer state of the art cyberweapon, concretely demonstrates what happens when control interfaces are successfully manipulated through a digital interface.
+1. And the third point should say that digital reputations will make identity theft a crime both more common and far more damaging than at present. Identity hacking would be the real growth industry of the 21st century under this scenario.
I preferred the 1994 version of this delusional vision of the future, where the internet would untether us from our “meatspace” identities and allow us to exist in a pseudonymous world of pure intellect and information.
Of course, that happened… a little. And this IoT will also happen… a little. The mistake is thinking that the future will be “like this” or “like that” when really it will mostly be like the present.
Meatspace. That’s a fun little word I haven’t heard in a while. Thanks for the reminder.
There’s this hope that security Will Just Happen.
It’s not necessarily crazy, but I doubt it.
Not before there have been a few spectacular security disasters. Nearly every important safety innovation has been driven by a disaster. Lighted exit signs above doors — Iriquois Theater Fire. Exit doors that open outward — Coconut Grove Fire.
A security hole in an embedded system could be much worse. Millions might be deployed before the hole is discovered, and it might not be practical to dig them all out and replace them. Even the most minor and subtle thing might serve as an attack vector — for example, what if someone could turn on every refrigerator simultaneously during peak demand on the electrical grid.
Most fridges are already on during peak demand, but other than being a stickler, yes, 100% agreement. Complex systems are built upon complex interactions which means holes large enough to drive a truck through. Stuxnet was designed to limit collateral damage by attacking a specific attack vector in only a specific way: it sped up and slowed down rapidly spinning centrifuges. Since it was designed by a Western government (probably), there was a lot of attention paid to preventing collateral damage.
Cyber-terrorists most likely will not have the same incentives.
In some places, peak demand occurs in the morning on the coldest days in the middle of winter.
It won’t because security is really hard and removes useful value that drives first adopters. And how can data be gathered when it would be so easy to just connect to the nearest open network and start talking.
The saving grace will be the utter uselessness of most of these things.
Author here. I talk about the security aspect in numerous other places, as that’s what I do for a living.
I’m also the OWASP project leader for the Internet of Things project:
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Internet_of_Things_Top_Ten_Project
Glad you’re thinking about it. It’s going to be essential.
This would have sounded interesting and imaginative fifteen years ago. Today it sounds like an uninventive mashup of Facebook and Google Glass–two things people despise plenty as they are.
Like existing social networks, early adopters will have public profiles, but the socially popular and physically attractive will quickly learn to turn off publicly-visible settings to avoid being noticed by icky people, lowering the status of being actively on the network
A powerful individual (or, in Cowenesque terms, a sexually attractive woman) doesn’t need comments. They already know what the comments are. So #3 points in the wrong direction and #1 deduces incorrectly on the kind of ‘interaction points’ that would be made available.
The only thing the Internet of Things is likely to do is allow the government to send you a nagging text message if you use too much toilet paper the next time you feel the need to go.
Frankly I don’t see why anyone would want the government to know how much milk they drink each and every day. Or how often they have sex. Or how much time they spend reading the news.
Government and corporations…so your employer too!
Because then I can be like the cool kids.
All of these innovations strike me as pretty terrible ideas, so they’ll likely be huge smashes, unless somebody comes up with something even less appealing to me.
Confusion between sufficient versus necessary conditions?
Really? I thought the following features would attract your interest.
They’ll also interact with the environment on your behalf, based on your preferences, to make the world more to your liking
So if I want to see only funny people around me, I can tell Siri, “Show me the funniest people in the room.”
Soon coming to an app store near you: an app to identify HBD-believers in your vicinity! 🙂
More seriously, you are probably dwelling on the particular examples presented by Miessler, and missing the innovations. If you think harder, I’m sure you can come up with applications you would find useful too, assuming the computer science behind these innovations is already worked out.
Like who to hit on and what lines to use?
Personally, I don’t think that will actually work for long on a macro scale. It would just up the competition level to screenplay-quality pickup lines. But they’d lack scarcity value.
In general, in competition for status, there’s no real progress because the supply of high-status individuals (i.e., attractive to attractive members of the opposite sex) doesn’t increase.
What a nightmare. Thank goodness for the coming apocalypse.
The real augmented reality UI is to eliminate from view the undesirable people, just replace them with the background. People such as your parents. Or children. Also, we wish to block certain people from seeing you.
Authorize payment of .01 bitcoin to Flurt? (Or: Upgrade to a FrankFlurt (.02) )
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Exactly. I’d be more concerned about this, but I’m pretty confident this society has about 15 years left in the tank. Twenty, tops. Maybe less if Trump gets elected.
I see it as a gradual evolution, with the full ensemble only being in place about 2030-2040.
But at that point, Miessler will be pretty close to accurate. Augmented-reality headgear will allow us to overlay everything we see and hear with generated content, whether it’s to make the buildings look like late 19th century London or to show where and what is available nearby. A whole ton of programs with varying degrees of machine intelligence will be broadcasting in public as well, showing up as impersonal messages to adults but cute avatars to children. And much of advertising will be dead or changed beyond recognition because of total ad-blocking software.
You could always take it off, but you’d be at a big inconvenience in doing so. Most signs on buildings would be either gone or rusting, including the street signs. Cities and towns would look rather bland with the naked eye.
“to make the buildings look like late 19th century London”
Will they make the cars look like horse-drawn carriages going half as fast?
“Will they make the cars look like horse-drawn carriages going half as fast?”
Well in LA, they’ll look like a lot of horse-drawn carriage that are mostly standing still.
”You could always take it off, but you’d be at a big inconvenience in doing so. Most signs on buildings would be either gone or rusting, including the street signs. Cities and towns would look rather bland with the naked eye.”
The problem is that augmented reality is just illusion in the end. Why not make beauty inherently real? So augmented reality is not required?
Comment of the day.
“make beauty inherently real.” What does that mean?
“Why not make beauty inherently real?”
The cost. If everyone can retire at 55 in an augmented psuedo-reality or retire at 65 in a physically beautiful reality which option will most people choose.
Sounds like we’re acquiring the ability to turn any part of the globe–or, every part of the globe–into the Potemkin village of choice.
This does not sound like a way to engage with “reality”: this sounds like a plan for avoiding and ignoring reality.
This already happens, but not in digital field but let say in mind field. We are constantly applying all kind of filters to reality, this would be the next level.
I guess some people will find “gurus” 50 years from now that allow them to se what reality really is, and they will see digital illusion, if they go further they’ll see the “whole illusion”, Induism call that maya.
Nice post, comments and topics.
regards.
I’d hate to be the funniest person at the party getting hunted down by bores.
Don’t worry, I think you’re safe.
Yawn
If everything is so damn virtual anyway, why even go out at all? I can see how familiar human priorities could lead to that result, but not a result where we all walk around with some stupid VR visor that broadcasts private information. Sure, we will soon have some workable VR visors, and they will allow for some novel human interactions, but they will not leave the house.
I know that every generation says something like this before a transformative technology hits, but this time it really feels true: I really don’t see why someone would want this, why someone like us would judge the tradeoffs to be worth it. Technology of the future will enable us to make actual reality totally awesome. We will be able to basically “hit print” to build entire, beautiful cities, complete with automated personal transportation networks. We will gain a lot of power to modify our appearance. Future hipsters will be able to grow sheep wool of any color, horns, whatever their perverted hearts desire. Why mask all this under video game avatars?
Lower the hatch on my Matrix Pod. I’ll be staying in for the next 60 years.
This is most likely the reason for the Fermi Paradox
What Daniel Miessler is talking about used to (like, just in the previous decade) be called “ubiquitous” or “pervasive” computing. Since that was a long term, pie-in-the-sky vision, people keep coming up with shorter term visions, one of which is the Internet of Things, and which refers precisely to alarm clocks that start your coffee maker or toaster. In other words, mechanical gimmickry controlled by not very complex software.
Let’s remember that technology only gets developed if humans want it developed, not because futurists think it sounds cool. Women will only create /connect interfaces that make it easier to ask them for a date if they’re not getting enough messages on OKCupid (they are). People will only broadcast their credit ratings to nearby folks if they want to (they won’t). Also, technological advancement is incremental, so even if a new equilibrium would be more desirable than our current equilibrium, we won’t necessarily get there unless there’s an iterative path where each step of the way, someone can create a product that makes them a profit and implements the change.
Think about Facebook, changing the security settings to ensure that advertisers can see your friends. Attractive women will have little incentive to lower their shields but there is money to be made so businesses (including the one that sold your you personal assistant) have powerful incentives to trick/entice you into doing it.
VR porn will have a drastic effect on how many offers women get.
Vernor Vinge covered this in Rainbows End if you’re into a sci fi take.
Sigh, $8 on the Kindle but $4 for a used paper back including shipping. The publishers need to get a little more price sensitive.
It seems criminal not to credit “Super Sad True Love Story” here.
Indeed. #3 is merely a politely phrased description of the Fuckability Rating
My inner cynic screams: a) why dream with the universal daemonization if chip & PIN cards are still a thing of the future in some places? b) super comfortable seats that adjust to your body size? People just want more leg room and be able to recline the seat in planes. c) The internet of things is too sexy to be real. I expect more of diabetes monitoring apps than augmented reality.
This sounds awful. Positively, completely, totally awful. So do the people who want such things. I am sad that I’m young enough to live through much of this crap.
My normative instincts are with Hamilton on this one … Hopefully, there will be some kind of opt-out to “Universal Daemonization”
See ‘Someone’s comment above: if people don’t want it, it won’t happen. Or at least there will be many opting out. There are still plenty of folks not on Facebook and the like, and not all of them are old people.
We’ll have maybe two extremes sides, people fully connected, people that won’t at all and most people in between.
Just wanted to say that people have been trying to devise robust reputation systems for a LONG time and it’s very much an unsolved problem.
Yes, Karma reputation systems are not remotely ready for these prime-time central social roles.
You mean religions and politics?
“They’ll also interact with the environment on your behalf, based on your preferences, to make the world more to your liking. So they’ll order a water when you sit down to eat at a restaurant, send a coffee request (and payment) to the barista as you walk into your favorite coffee shop, and raise the temperature in any build you walk into because it knows you have a cold.”
This is a classic example of using technology to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I already order water when I sit down to eat, and when I walk into my favorite diner, the coffee is on the counter by the time I sit down. What difference does it make if a technological personal assistant sends the message, or I do myself? And as for raising the temperature “in any building” I walk into, I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to have control over the thermostat in any building that I walk into, so I have no idea what this guy is talking about.
Somehow I think a Walking Dead reality is more likely than this one, at least outside Elysium
“I mostly agree…but when?”
When Facebook implements the Unlike button. Zuckerberg is a hero for refusing to do it.
Robots buying things made by robots is going to be the economy of the future.
In free lunch economics, workers take money and throw it into blackholes.
Consumers come out of whiteholes at a rate determined by monopoly profits which create wealth – “the wealth effect”.
You must be one of those TANSTAAFL economists who thinks economies are zero sum, capital depreciates, only work creates wealth, and all those other dismal science stuff.
Forget augmented reality, can I just get Virtual Icons beside all the user names on my favorite sites?
I’ll pick an old man with long hair and beard waiving a sign with “The End is Nigh” for mulp. And maybe “Reagan is the manifestation of the Beast” on the other side.
Just like today!
I preemptively cast downvotes for all of you who want all public settings to be hotter and more humid. Wear a jacket so the a/c can stay on.
“So if I want to see only funny people around me, I can tell Siri, “Show me the funniest people in the room.”, and 4 people will light up with a green outline.”
This is poor interface design. Everyone knows a green outline means they work for the Riddler.
This strikes me as confused and poorly thought through. Miessler starts by saying that people underestimate the Internet of Things, but talks mostly about future versions of what we have now in the part of the internet that is not IoT. It’s not clear what he means when he says that the software people use will “register as more significant” than the Internet itself. If he means that people will be more aware of their client software than the Internet, that’s exactly the situation today. Most people are more aware of their web browsers than the Internet that makes it possible for browsers to function. In fact, for most people, the Internet _is_ their browser. If he means that software that requires an Internet connection will become more important than the connection, his confusion borders on delusion.
Most of the part quoted by Cowen talks about things that already exist, although Miessler is sometimes confused about terminology. What he calls personal assistants and daemons are clients and servers. (The terms “daemon” and “personal assistant” are currently used for other concepts.) When he talks about daemons and PAs communicating, he’s talking about the three-tier architecture that dominates the Internet today; databases supply information to web servers, which pass it over the Internet to clients, which allow people to use it.
Digital reputation already exists, and people control it the same ways they’ve always controlled reputation: keeping secrets, persuading third-parties to stop giving out specific information or to change it, and giving out information they want to be public. In the future we will probably have more options for doing these things and reputation management will be correspondingly more complicated.
Under “augmented reality” Miessler talks about search. There will be more types of information that we can search for, and results will increasingly come in graphical form (images rather than words). That’s certainly a safe prediction.
As other commenters have pointed out, there’s no consideration of security issues or how technology interacts with social structure.
So, an article about the social interaction you will be able to do with your iPhone in the future, made to seem more significant by creating new terms for existing things with well established names, that focuses on social uses for technology while ignoring the nature of social exchange. Miessler’s prediction: more of what we have now.
We should have a full discussion somewhere. I think you’re mistaken about pretty much everything you said here.
OK. Where do we have the discussion?
So instead of having fresh coffee in the morning, I’ll be able to find a good coffee shop, or know who’s funny in the room? Way to sell it, brother!
Clearly, we don’t yet know what the internet of things will be good for. Most of the current applications sound pretty trivial and require massive amounts of technology investment to achieve. I still think things talking to each other will lead to interesting and useful applications, but I have no real idea what they are.
In the meantime, the internet of things remains another hype cycle, and all the protestation just reinforces that.
“We” know what it will be good for but getting “you” to pay for all the capital assets is the big problem, especially when “we” expect you to pay for capital assets “we” dictate with you having no alternative.
Let’s say Apple is the “We” – your Apple self driving car will require you have an Apple iPhone and all passengers an Apple iWatch and you drive only on Apple authorized roads to Apple authorized destinations when the building uses Apple automatic doors with the car charging being done by the Apple charger which is powered by the Apple iSolar and Apple iBatteryWall with supplemental power from the Apple iWindPower over the Apple iGrid. The building HVAC will of course be the Apple iComfortClimate with Apple iTruLight and you will sit on Apple iLounger and sleep on an Apple iCloud.
And this Apple system will be far superior to the Google system based on free Android control systems offered by partners Sealy mattress, Honeywell, Tesla Motors, Anderson Doors.
If you look at worlds where everything is already identified and connected to the Internet (MMORPGs), you won’t see anybody automating these kind of context-sensitive tasks. They just don’t take that much time, in the case of ordering something, or they’re hard to get going, like reputation. What you do see is bots for really repetitive tasks where speed helps (which is why we have the Roomba) and actual facts like what guild someone belongs to and what gear they have.
No.
These things are not that likely to happen.
All of the ideas quoted, but especially #s 1 and 2, imply a ubiquitous platform that makes this massive ecosystem and information to seamlessly interoperable. Current incentives in the market are working in the opposite direction, with increasing fragmentation as device manufacturers have little incentive to commoditize themselves in favor of some monolithic platform. Nest, Sonos, Hue, all operate on their own platform; Uber and Airbnb don’t share information across profiles; and Google Glass-like optical overlays for all this info seem unlikely to take off.
It will happen when the Federal agency responsible for buildings and/or the military adopts a standard for COTS purchases.
Most likely for integrated energy management and for integrated security systems. Most of the purchases are still not requiring COTS products, and the COTS products are allowed to use proprietary systems for integration. Eg, when USB or HDMI is required, the specific integration features used are optional and not required standards across vendors.
This is silly. Most of these employ relatively capital intensive solutions to move incredibly minor frictions. Public spaces will respond to individual temperature preferences? Owners have a preference for less energy use, the temperature of a room takes several minutes to adjust, in a space with 5 or more people what are the odds that the average temperature they prefer will differ notably between 5 other random people? Will it matter? 3 is the only one that actually has important implications but I don’t see the impact of this as being part of the internet of things per se. We have either tools that can be called upon when it matters or privacy protections to limit what is possible with existing hardware.
“You wave your hand on your home lock, and it opens because it knows you.”
That sort of prediction just seems nuts. We already have simple mechanical devices for door security and, to the extent they’re compromised, it’s mostly because they’re not physically sturdy enough.
The mechanical device has very few failure modes, and all are well known. The electronic device (which presumably is networked) relies on multiple layers of software and is inherently complex, with failure modes which will be fully exposed only after they are exploited.
How many really want to replace a reliable, simple device with an inherently complex one, just to obtain a very small increment of convenience and, is it really worth the possibility that you may have to pay to get the ransomware turned off just so you can enter your own home? And lets not even think about the possibility that a malicious hacker might gain control of the motor vehicle in which you’re riding.
Of course, the stakes are not that high if we’re talking about a residential door lock. But what if we’re talking about electric power grids, or air traffic controls, or any other system that’s critical to life safety? Have engineers completely forgotten Murphy and the KISS principle?
What’s missing in this inane “You wave your hand on your home lock” futurism is, where’s the benefit-to-risk ratio? Sure, a few enthusiasts will buy stuff like this, but most of us will want to see more significant benefits than not having to fumble for a key before buying stuff like this, even before considering security risks.
exactly. when I was a kid, I wanted to live in a home where the door would work like the spaceship doors in Star Wars. But then I realized that normal doors work just fine and having Star Wars doors, while technically feasible, would just send a message that you are just a hopeless dork.
Besides, paying a doorman demonstrates you are filthy rich while spending even more money figuring out how to make your door open and close when the doorman would open and close it would make you a dork.
But if you started out as a dork who spent a decade making your doors open and close when a doorman would open and close it, you would become filthy rich and could hire a doorman to stand by your doors and gesture.
After all, making doors open and close as well as a doorman would open and close them is not been solved well in 50 years of trying to automate the doorman. Really solving the problem would give you a market of tens of millions of doors to upgrade.
A doorman can be very helpful in keeping away confused people who are always ranting on and on about the same subject.
What’s most likely is a large market/technology in false identities/information to conceal the prying eyes; in other words, people will know even less about one another than before the IOT. Not unlike today’s social media, which is full of false information to mislead/deceive. The more we think we know about others, the less we do.
I like how a majority of the comments here are negative. Really, I am heartened! But if you’d described Twitter 50 years ago and asked people if they’d like something like that, they would have spat on the ground and said “No thanks! I hope nothing like that ever gets created.” (Indeed, in 1910 E.M. Forster wrote “The Machine Stops”, a dystopian short story that sourly predicted much about a society saturated in social media and IoT technology, much of which we already have some version of.)
Yet here we are. Somebody was either cynical or naive enough to make Twitter and then make it rub people’s pleasure centers enough that it’s now widely adopted. So, I can only assume that’s what’s going to happen with all this IoT stuff too: we aren’t going to get what Miessler predicts, we’re going to get something much more malignant and Idiocracizing.
That is, unless we actually do something about it now.
Twitter, being quite useless, is not widely adopted at all – only five percent of cell phone users worldwide partake.
my feeling is that if people wanted to let random strangers know their credit scores, they could always just wear a T-shirt with the score on the back. No need for augmented reality.
“I mostly agree…but when?”
When central planners define the standards required and then the 20% of the economy run by central planners mandates the standards be followed to sell to the 20% central planner.
Until the Federal government mandates that first standards be defined and second, all contractors conform to the standards in supply the Federal government with COTS products, there will be no Internet of Things that works better than your electronic appliances work with a single remote control.
The Federal government is the reason you can go to a hardware store and buy nuts and bolts without regard to the manufacturer of the device (or its nation of origin) you are putting them into. Even during WWI, manufacturers used their own screw thread standards to ensure you had to keep buying parts for service from them and not a competitor or their supplier. Beta v VHS is just the tip of “the manufacturers will not adopt standards without government dictates” rule even when they almost always screw themselves.
“Human objects will display their favorite books, where they grew up, etc. for read-only information, and they’ll have /connect interfaces for people to link up professionally, to request a date, or to digitally flirt if within 50 meters, etc. ”
We call that “Facebook”.
It’s not what anyone else thinks is “the internet of Things” (and why restrict flirting to 50 meters?).
(The assistant examples are less than compelling; I don’t expect (want, if I live/work there) a building to heat up if I have a cold; other people are there. And I don’t want magical digital ordering of coffee when I walk to a coffee shop – because my order changes, or I might be there picking up other stuff or meeting someone.
Automation is worse than non-automation if done wrong, and it’s real easy to do wrong.)
This is like reading a Boing Boing or Wired article circa 1998, is how I feel.
Though contra Mulp, note that “Beta v VHS is just the tip of “the manufacturers will not adopt standards without government dictates” rule even when they almost always screw themselves.” has not actually been the case too often.
Did the Government make computer makers adopt USB or PCI or SATA? Not that I’m aware of; the State would be the last party I can imagine coming up with either.
Likewise, in home automation (our base, real-world Internet of Things) there are really only a few interfaces anyone uses: WiFi with IP, Z-Wave (under a few brand names), and ZigBee.
Beyond that it’s all just software support for the capability descriptions and standard interfaces under those, especially the latter two (and more of the former, too, now that Apple’s in the game with HomeKit).
Customers drive standard adoption in the real world, where customers want all-encompassing solutions. (VHS and Beta were pure competitors, not complements – but every IoT device complements every other and every hub, ideally.)
It’s much more tempting for a seller to be interoperable when every other seller is trying to be interoperable; because then when you’re the only guy who isn’t interoperable, why would anyone want to buy your stuff? (Answer: If your stuff is a complete suite, better implemented, and competitive on price. This is not something that happens a lot, though arguable Apple’s done it for the high-end phone/tablet/PC market.)
To be in the IOT and not of the IOT.
Anyone remember when the Segway was going to be so popular it was going to transform the way we build cities?
How about the predictions of everyone wearing Google Glass or something like it?
It’s one thing to be able to predict the production of a new form of technology. That’s often easy. For example, VR headsets will be on the market in one year that will allow for a truly immersive artificial reality. We know this because we already have the prototypes and the schedule for delivery. What we don’t know is how the market will respond to them, what applications will be developed that use them, etc.
On paper, the Segway was transformative. In reality, it’s a niche product for several reasons – it’s too dangerous for sidewalks, and too dorky looking to be cool. And it’s not fast enough to replace a car or fun enough to be a sport. So it was and remains a niche product. But the conventional wisdom before its release was that it would be transformative.
Google glass has failed because people don’t like it when others wear google glass. It has a sky-high ‘douche factor’. That was not predicted either.
We could easily see a public backlash against the Internet of Things that completely shuts down many of these innovations. Or maybe not. The future is just not that predictable.
Weird stuff. All about people being measured and ranked all the time, or machines automatically doing things for you that you haven’t asked for. Doesn’t sound like freedom or choice to me.
This is the shining, utopian future capitalism is creating. Your virtual assistant will flirt with other people’s virtual assistants so you never have to interact with them like a human being and can just stare down at your phone in social situations. You can learn who is “funny” in a room based on how many “lol” emoticons their meme-reposts got on Facebook.
Really makes you hope the “Mad Max” vision of the future is more accurate.
Upon further reflection, maybe a universal ID is the way to go so long as people have the option to have a fresh start by declaring “moral bankruptcy” through a special court if they do too many bad things … The history on their ID would get wiped clean, but the fact of declaring “moral bankruptcy” would still be on one’s universal record
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