Internet of Things in celebration and provocation at MIT
IoTFest reveals exemplary applications as well as challenges
Last Saturday’s IoT Festival at MIT became a meeting ground for people connecting the physical world. Embedded systems developers, security experts, data scientists, and artists all joined in this event. Although it was called a festival, it had a typical conference format with speakers, slides, and question periods. Hallway discussions were intense.
However you define the Internet of Things (O’Reilly has its own take on it, in our Solid blog site and conference), a lot stands in the way of its promise. And these hurdles are more social than technical.
Some of the social discussion we have to have before we get the Internet of Things rolling are:
We already have a lot of the technology we need, but it has to be pulled together. It must be commercially feasible at a mass production level, and robust in real-life environments presenting all their unpredictability. Many problems need to be solved at what the Jim Gettys (famous for his work on the X Window System, OLPC, and bufferbloat) called “layer 8 of the Internet”: politics....MUCH, MUCH MORE
- What effects will all this data collection, and the injection of intelligence into devices, have on privacy and personal autonomy? And how much of these precious values are we willing to risk to reap the IoT’s potential for improving life, saving resources, and lowering costs?
- Another set of trade-offs involve competing technical goals. For instance, power consumption can constrain features, and security measures can interfere with latency and speed. What is the priority for each situation in which we are deploying devices? How do we make choices based on our ultimate goals for these things?
- How do we persuade manufacturers to build standard communication protocols into everyday objects? For those manufacturers using proprietary protocols and keeping the data generated by the objects on private servers, how can we offer them business models that makes sharing data more appealing than hoarding it?
- What data do we really want? Some industries are already drowning in data. (Others, such as health care, have huge amounts of potential data locked up in inaccessible silos.) We have to decide what we need from data and collect just what’s useful. Collection and analysis will probably be iterative: we’ll collect some data to see what we need, then go back and instrument things to collect different data.
- How much can we trust the IoT? We all fly on planes that depend heavily on sensors, feedback, and automated controls. Will we trust similar controls to keep self-driving vehicles from colliding on the highway at 65 miles per hour? How much can we take humans out of the loop?
- Similarly, because hubs in the IoT are collecting data and influencing outcomes at the edges, they require a trust relationship among the edges, and between the edges and the entity who is collecting and analyzing the data.
- What do we need from government? Scads of data that is central to the IoT–people always cite the satellite GIS information as an example–comes from government sources. How much do we ask the government for help, how much do we ask it to get out of the way of private innovators, and how much can private innovators feed back to government to aid its own efforts to make our lives better?
- It’s certain that IoT will displace workers, but likely that it will also create more employment opportunities. How can we retrain workers and move them to the new opportunities without too much disruption to their lives? Will the machine serve the man, or the other way around?
