Are You Ready For IoT - Internet of Things
Come 2020 and millions or even billions of smart electronic devices, linked by the Internet, would interact with each other independent of human intervention. This network of interacting electronic devices is named as the Internet of Things (IoT). Looking at it from our times (2013), one could expect the IoT to consist of PCs, tablet computers, digital cameras, e-Book readers, mobile phones, robots, private and public computer networks and whatever new smart electronic devices that would be developed between now and 2020.
What would that mean to you and me? Here are some of the key benefits... and costs.
BENEFITS
Automation: Automation will have reached such high levels as to cause a paradigm shift in our lifestyles. One of the most significant changes, that we can expect to see is that our lives will become far more comfortable than now. Physically, we would have to travel less. There will be even more time to dedicate to our primary occupations and of course, to vacations, rest and relaxation.
Here are a few examples to help one appreciate what life would be like in the IoT age. You can, for example, expect your PC to automatically order groceries when their stocks fall below set levels. If you had a specialised robot at home, you can set it to open the door to a visitor after verifying his/her identity. So, if you have both a PC and robot at home, when the grocery store's delivery person arrives at the door and rings the bell (assuming that his/her identity info. (information) has been stored in the robot), you can expect your robot to verify his/her identity info. and open the door, check in your purchases, send an electronic acknowledgement to the store, say "Bye!" to the delivery person, close the door and then deposit the purchases at a places you have taught it to. Devices using high-tech sensors can then be expected to notify your PC that fresh stocks have arrived (as well as their quantities) and the PC, in turn, will automatically update stock balances and pay off the store by issuing an instruction to your bank/credit card account. So you could have been out fishing or working and all this would still happen correctly without the need for your being at home! Sounds good? Your PC can also remind you when maintenance of your oven, fridge or car is next due and optionally, call or SMS the technician to fix an appointment. If the technicians' identity info. is stored in your robot, then, clearly, you don't need to be at home when he/she calls. This means you can plan to do something else during the technician's visit, even if that will take you away from home! And, on a day when you returned home, tired, and went to off to sleep, won't it be a pleasant surprise to wake up and discover that your mobile phone sent birthday greetings to some friends automatically, even when you had forgotten and were sleeping? With the IoT, the possibilities of automating tasks are seemingly endless.
Cost Savings: Due to the inherent efficiency of electronic networks as well as elimination of many intermediate jobs/processes involved in trade, there would be a marked, positive impact on the economy so that prices of goods and/or services may fall.
COSTS
Problems of IoT device failure/malfunction:
The first setback to the joys of highly automated living is likely to be experienced when an IoT device fails/malfunctions. It can be an unnerving experience, the severity of which will depend on the kind of failure. Suppose your robot suddenly develops a fault one day and fails to identify someone who rings the bell of your house? The visitor may be a friend or person you have granted access to your home, but the robot does not recognize him/her. Instead it comes to the conclusion that the person outside is a burglar and seizes him/her, chains him/her up securely and then sends off an SOS message to the police? What if it mistook you for a burglar and made you a captive in your own house? You will need to switch it off immediately and call an expert to fix the problem.
More damaging is a bug or malfunction that remains dormant for sometime - the longer it goes undetected, the greater the damage. Take, for example, the case of automated grocery purchases by your PC (above), once again. You notice over a period of several months that your grocery bills have been rising without any justifiable reason. So you watch the next purchase carefully and find that the some of the quantities mentioned in the invoice are higher than those ordered. You rush to the grocery store and make a complaint. They investigate and find that a fraudster at a distant place has found your store customer code. Using an ingenious method, he/she intercepts orders sent by your PC and selectively increases some order quantities before they reach the store. He/she simultaneously inserts a spurious goods return advice in the store's computer which generates a refund that accounts for the difference in quantities. However, instead of the credit going to your bank/credit card account, it goes off to the fraudster's account. The last step, how credit due to you gets redirected to the fraudster's (unknown) bank account is something the store itself can't make out! In this situation, the longer it takes you to wake up and take action, the larger is the quantum of your money stolen. Early detection (say after the very first or second purchase) would have resulted in relatively small damages while the more delayed it gets, the more damages you stand to suffer.
Computer/technology literacy will become a must:
How comfortable are you with modern, high-tech terms like phishing, vishing, HTTP, HTTPS, ASCII, Java, HTML, bandwidth, bit, byte, LAN, WAN, WiFi and 'Internet Protocol'? (To know more about one of these terms, look up an encyclopaedia or visit Wikipedia and enter the term in the 'Search' box e.g. enter 'phishing' and click on the magnifying glass symbol to get details about phishing.) Were you aware that email is valid proof in a court of law? Did you know that digital signatures can be used to authenticate the sender of an electronic document in a manner that is tamper-proof? Good if you did, since these are some of the basics that one needs to be familiar with to fruitfully and confidently use a computer today. And if it's that way it is today, you can be sure you'll need to know much more (and keep learning) in the IoT era. How else will you, for example, be able to understand the intricacies of a legal case involving IoT, in which, say, you are implicated? Or understand the strengths and weaknesses of the Government's Information Technology (IT) policy in order to vote for or against a proposed change?
While keeping abreast with IoT and technology may be easy for workers in the IT industry, professors, scientists, engineers and the like, the elderly and those in other occupations will find it hard to keep pace. So, what's the way out for them? They will need to take help from an expert, whenever necessary. A new breed of 'public technology consultants', professionals akin to public prosecutors in law, may spring up to fill this need.
