Computers Everywhere: What It Means for Our Lives and Careers

In 1949, Popular Mechanics predicted, "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."  This forecast, of course, was technically accurate — it just missed the mark by being far too conservative.  Considering that the iPhone 5 weighs less than four ounces, the experts at Popular Mechanics failed to foresee that computers would weigh 12,000 times less than their best estimate.

Over the ensuing decades, computers have increasingly become smaller and lighter — as well as faster, cheaper, and easier-to-use.  From mainframes to minicomputers to desktop PCs to laptops to smartphones, the evolution of computing technology has marched forward at a relentless pace, and there is no chance that it will come to a screeching halt any time soon.

Just as computers moved from data centers to desktops to laps to pockets, the next frontier in computing will bring them increasingly closer to our everyday lives; in fact, they will become embedded in all the devices we use and nearly every object that surrounds us.

This is the vision of the "Internet of Things"¹ — a vision in which we won't just plug into technology once in a while, but instead will be constantly immersed in a digital universe of seamless connections to everyone and everything.

In their book Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology,² Peter Lucas and his co-authors point out that the world now produces 10 billion microprocessors per year, and that number is continually increasing.  Only a small fraction of those processors are used to make desktops, laptops, tablets, and cell phones.  The vast majority are embedded in everyday products like washing machines, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners, and wristwatches.

The reason is that it is far cheaper to manufacture an appliance in which all of the information is in software, which is easy to duplicate and basically free once the first unit is created, compared to a mechanical knob on a washing machine, which is costly and complicated to make and install. 

While economics drove the redesign of countless products, there is a benefit that has not yet been exploited.  The processors in these products allow users to communicate with them more easily, but we are just beginning to see the potential for what the world will be like when all of the products can also communicate with each other.

Until now, according to Lucas, we've been at a stage of the connectivity revolution that is equivalent to the time when people began to use PCs to replace typewriters and calculators, but lacked an efficient way to connect them.  It wasn't until modems and the Internet allowed computers to communicate with each other that they realized their potential.  Similarly, we are now surrounded by billions of processors that, in most cases, still can't exchange information with each other.  But all that will soon change.

In their book, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology, Peter Lucas and his co-authors point out that as of 2012, the world already produces 10 billion microprocessors per year. Only a small fraction of those processors are used to make desktops, laptops, tablets, and cell phones. The vast majority are embedded in everyday products like washing machines, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners, automobiles, and wristwatches.

According to Research Professor Heikki Ailisto of the Technical Research Centre of Finland, known as VTT, "Three big waves can be identified in telecommunications in the past century or so.³  First, the telephone connected 500 million places.  The mobile phone then connected 5 billion people.  The Internet of Things will connect 50 billion devices, machines, and objects."

Lucas believes that 50 billion is just the beginning, hence the name of his book.  He declares that "a near-future world containing trillions of computers is simply a done-deal." 

VTT is one of many firms developing one of the basic components of this new reality.  With researchers from the University of Tokyo, the organization has been working on universal identification, or uID, technology.  This will enable everyday products, as well as parts and materials, to be tagged with sensors that will identify and track them throughout the entire life-cycle.   Ailisto explains, "A timber plank, for instance, can be tagged with information on which forest the timber was cut from, where it was sawn, how many times it has been painted, and with what paints."

Another initiative is a program called OPENS, for Open Smart Spaces.  So far, it has resulted in the creation of an interoperability platform named Smart M3, which is designed to allow all of the digital appliances and objects in the home or office to communicate and share information with each other, even if they were made by different companies.

What will this mean in practical terms?  Here are a few everyday examples cited by various sources:

1. If you can't find your car keys, you'll simply send them a text message, and they'll reply with a message that tells you their location.
2. If the eggs in your refrigerator are about to expire, the refrigerator will send you a message.
3. Sensors will be able to constantly monitor your health when you are well, and if you have a medical condition, you can have updates automatically sent in real time to doctors or other caregivers.  Such sensors are central to the technologies described in the Wearable and Implantable Health Devices trend in this issue.
4. Cars will drive themselves, and will be able to identify their location, avoid objects in the road, and communicate with other vehicles, as explained in our analysis of the trend, Driverless Cars, Coming to Your Street Sooner than You Think in the November 2012 issue of Trends.
5. You'll be able to monitor how much you're spending on electricity from the Smart Grid with new metering technology that will allow you to identify when it would be cheapest to turn on an appliance.  You'll also be able to sell unused electricity from your electric car back to the grid.
6. Information collected from all of the devices and things around you could theoretically be captured and used for companies to tailor marketing messages to you based on your specific location, interests, and activities.

These are just a few of the limitless possibilities.  Going forward, we offer the following forecasts:

First, the "Internet of Things" will quickly morph into a network of unprecedented power. 

As discussed in previous issues of Trends, the phenomenon of network effects tends to magnify the impact of technologies that are linked to each other.  The classic example is the fax machine:  The first machine was essentially worthless because it could not be used to send a fax since there was no machine to receive it.  As each new machine was put into use, however, the value of the network and each machine that could access it increased exponentially.  We will see an even greater impact from the "Internet of Things."  When trillions of devices and objects are able to communicate with each other, the effect will surpass anything we can imagine today.

Second, when people are truly immersed in the "Internet of Things," all of their movements, purchases, and activities will be tracked, and this will create a threat to individuals' privacy and security. 

It is already possible to track people by their cell phone usage, their credit-card purchases, their Internet history, and the GPS devices in their cars, but this is nothing compared to the data that will be collected when all of the appliances, objects, and devices in homes, office buildings, and public places are constantly monitoring where you are and what you are doing.  Ultimately, the companies that do the best job of protecting data will perform the best in the marketplace.  Lucas compares this outcome to today's consumer preference for environmentally-friendly businesses.  As he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,⁴ "Pollution, to some extent, is an inevitable consequence to an industrialized world.  We can't completely avoid pollution, but we can work constantly in many ways to mitigate it, to minimize it, to tolerate as little of it as necessary [and] build clean technologies every place we can.  I think privacy will end up being approached the same way.  We will never be able to completely eliminate the negative consequences computer technology has on privacy but we can work constantly to mitigate it, and. . . the market will come to reward products and companies that value privacy. . . ."