Study outlines positives, negatives of an Internet of Things future

Experts from industry and academia mostly agree that by 2025 the Internet of Things will be pervasive and ubiquitous while agreeing on little else in a new report from the Pew Research Center. The Internet of Things, an emerging state where everything that can be connected will be and machines will communicate with one another en masse without human direction, has been likened to the Industrial Revolution in terms of its impact on society in the coming years. The Pew study, released May 14, asked more than 1,600 experts if the Internet of Things will have “widespread and beneficial” effects by 2025, with the overwhelming majority, 83 per cent, answering in the affirmative. “The quality of real-time information that becomes available will take the guesswork out of much of capacity planning and decision-making,” JP Rangaswami, chief scientist for Salesforce.com, said in his response. “The net effect will be to reduce waste everywhere: in physical flows and logistics, in the movement of people and goods; in logical flows and logistics, in the movement of ideas and information; decisions will be made faster and better, based on more accurate information.” Respondents mentioned new sensors that could provide real-time health data to doctors and hospitals, the automation of homes and cities to improve energy efficiency, and improved productivity in all kinds of workplaces. The experts said many of the biggest impacts of the Internet of Things will be invisible to everyday consumers, with constant communication between devices leading to an entire secret life of machines that monitor our lives and control our surroundings. Oil pipelines will detect and patch leaks, highways will monitor their own driving surfaces and direct traffic flows to the most efficient routes, and smart shelves will order the most popular products before they run low, they predicted. Despite its invisibility, some experts expect that the Internet of Things will become an important driver in changing behaviour, such as the so-called “quantified self” movement that aims to monitor and track individual physical activity and health. “Every part of our life will be quantifiable, and eternal, and we will answer to the community for our decisions,” wrote Laurel Papworth, a social media educator. “For example, skipping the gym will have your gym shoes auto tweet to the peer-to-peer health insurance network that will decide to degrade your premiums.” Duncan Stewart, director of telecom research at Deloitte Canada, said in a phone interview on Wednesday that the Internet of Things has been hyped for years, but is unlikely to have a major impact anywhere where human behaviour is involved. “Most people don't want to quantify themselves,” he said. “They know, don't have the second piece of pizza and walk to the store instead of driving. We don't need $500 devices to tell us that.” Stewart, a former biotechnology investor, said one could “drive several trucks through the gap” between the “quantified self” technologies discussed in the media and the actual devices that are likely to be approved by regulators. The hype around the Internet of Things, he said, is driven by digital hipsters, or “people who prefer a digital and technological alternative because it has an element of cool about it.” Stewart said such individuals often downplay or don’t consider the privacy concerns and other hurdles that will affect the adoption of the Internet of Things by consumers. “The privacy, the security implications of machine-to-machine are nontrivial and will be important,” he said. “Smart thermostats are great unless it allows people to steal all the money from your bank account.” Many of the experts who responded to the Pew report also cautioned that the “evolution of embedded devices” will have profound implications for privacy. Nick Wreden, of the University of Technology Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, told the survey “there will be absolutely no privacy, not even in the jungle, away from civilization.” Peter Jacoby, identified in the Pew report as a college professor, said the effects of the Internet of things will be “pernicious” and intrude in our lives so thoroughly as to eliminate the notion of privacy even within our own bodies. “We might as well inject ourselves into the Internet of Things,” he said. “By 2025, we will have long ago given up our privacy. The Internet of Things will demand — and we will give willingly — our souls.” Some respondents noted that, instead of seeking out connection through smartphones and other connected devices, in the future people will have to actively seek out disconnection and disengagement from the Internet of Things. “We will eventually hit a wall where we’ve decided that it was an error to give up too much ,” said Valerie Bock, technical services lead for Q2 Learning, LLC, in her response to the survey. “Perhaps we’ll even develop well-accepted, workable norms about when communication with those outside the room is to be shut down … and I expect we’ll have a whole protocol around switching off — akin to today’s handshake.” A workplace plugged into the Internet of Things will be “more productive and more prison-like,” according to law professor Frank Pasquale. He likened it to “an ‘ankle monitor’ of the mind that upgrades scanning not merely to location, but also to observable ‘outputs’ like typing and eye movements.” Futurist Marcel Bullinga said in the report that the future workplace will lead to a widespread diminishing in the skills necessary for work and a commensurate drop in the standards of education, although these changes will not necessarily be for the worse. “There will be … less need of knowing facts, as they present themselves on the spot in real-time on your glasses,” he wrote. “A major global megatrend here is de-skilling — our children will learn less and achieve more.” The Pew report also touches on the idea that the Internet of Things is naive technocratic utopianism, or an elite idea for the small slice of the world’s population that is rich, educated and tech-savvy. “Right now, Google Glass follows the pattern of other technology adoptions, where what I see are a handful of first-world white men touting their shiny new toys,” K.G. Schneider, a university librarian, said in the report. “Put this in context with someone struggling to get by on a daily basis — in the U.S. or in other countries: what these devices primarily signify is a growing gulf between the tech haves and have-nots.” Justin Reich, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, gave the Pew survey a response that compared the influence of the Internet of Things to our current smartphone-obsessed world. “It will have widespread beneficial effects, along with widespread negative effects,” he said. “There will be conveniences and privacy violations. There will be new ways for people to connect, as well as new pathways towards isolation, misanthropy, and depression. “Everything that you love and hate about smartphones will be more so,” he added. — With reporting by Peter Henderson at phenderson@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Study outlines positives, negatives of an Internet of Things future

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Study outlines positives, negatives of an Internet of Things future

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