IBM’s Smarter Planet team has created a great 5 minute video explaining the emerging trend of Internet of Things, an exciting topic ReadWriteWeb has and will continue to cover frequently and in depth. Internet of Things is about, as the video explains, the coming future when there are more “things” on the Internet (sensors especially) than there are people.
The result of that will be “a kind of global data field” the video says. “If we can actually begin to see the patterns in the data, then we have a much better chance of getting our arms around this. That’s where societies become more efficient, that’s where more innovation is sparked.” Check out this artistic, succinct, optimistic and inspiring video explaining what could well become a big factor in how the future unfolds.
This is heavy stuff, clearly aimed to fostering positive and substantial cultural change through technology – by opening up a new plane of options for humanity. Of course there’s little critique of this movement in videos like this; that’s something we’re still exploring but we imagine surveillance is one down side. There’s also some risk of paying so much attention to our machines that we lose track of the joy of engaging directly with the world around us.
The upside as described in the video is big, though.
“When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscience and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations. So you could look at the planet as an information, creation and transmission system, and the universe was hearing its information but we werent. But increasingly now we can, early days, baby steps days, but we can actually begin to hear the planet talking to us.”
To track this trend across multiple vendors, check out ReadWriteWeb’s Internet of Things archive.
Photo by Svilen Milev.
