Is This A Good Idea : Science Channel

November 21, 2011

The New York Times has an interesting article on Google X, the R&D lab that's so low-profile that when you run a search for it on Google, the official web site that it yields is a 404 Error. It's where the global information octopus apparently is trying to develop various astonishing new products, some of which might transform our civilization even more radically than Google's "What Do You Love?" mashup app, which conceivably enables you to amass every available iota of data about Justin Bieber, from watching his YouTube videos and reading autobiographies of him, to searching his location via Google Earth, to graphing the ups and downs of his popularity over the past 12 months. (It also offers you a chance to "plan your Justin Bieber events" with Google Calendar or organize a debate about Justin Bieber via Google Moderator, with suggested topics such as "How do you feel about Justin Bieber?" and "What is the worst thing about Justin Bieber?")

A Web of Things Curated by Google

But as usual, I digress. Some of the technological game-changers reportedly being pondered by Google's brain trust happen to be stuff that I've written about in this blog previously, such as a space elevator and driverless cars. Google also reportedly is contemplating deploying fleets of mobile robots equipped with cameras to photograph the planet's streets for Google Maps (which I'm hoping will also lead to additional sightings of Horse Boy). But all that pales in comparison to an even more neuron-moshing notion buried far down in the Times article, which involves creating a Google-centric "Web of Things" in which not just computers and phones but all kinds of stuff would be connected to the Internet -- and, presumably, searchable and accessible as well:

Every time anyone uses the Web, it benefits Google, the company argued, so it could be good for Google if home accessories and wearable objects, not just computers, were connected. Among the items that could be connected: a garden planter (so it could be watered from afar); a coffee pot (so it could be set to brew remotely); or a light bulb (so it could be turned off remotely). Google said in May that by the end of this year another team planned to introduce a Web-connected light bulb that could communicate wirelessly with Android devices.

Bringing a Coke Machine Online

Google's scientists, of course, aren't the first to think of connecting everyday items to the Internet. Back in 1982, Carnegie Mellon University students figured out how to use an old-fashioned DEC mainframe to monitor the supply of cans in the computer lab's Coke machine. In the 1990s, Cambridge University researchers one-upped that feat by creating a software protocol, HTCPCP, which allowed them to view and control their lab's coffee pot remotely, presumably from anywhere on the planet.

Since then, the idea of hooking up ordinary everyday objects to the Internet has mushroomed. A European Union website titled The Internet of Things Council has sprung up to track the latest developments. IBM has been gearing up to be a big player in the Web of Things. Recently, the business software and services giant announced that it is joining forces with Italian hardware architecture firm Eurotech to make available an open-source protocol called Message Queuing Telemetry Support, or MQTT, which basically is the equivalent of the familiar HTTP protocol that meat-bags like us use, except that it's for inanimate objects. Such an infrastructure would further enable use of data generated by the RFID tagging of virtually everything, another idea that I wrote about in this blog post a few years back.

RFID and Printable Transistors

Another potentially huge breakthrough is the development of tiny, super-cheap printable transistors, which will enable manufacturers to put tags on even the humblest objects, such as Sharpies or Han Solo Pez dispensers. Hans Vestberg, president and CEO of Swedish wireless- device maker Ericsson, told shareholders last year that by 2020 there will be 50 billion Internet users, the majority of them non human.

As Readwriteweb blogger Scott Fulton III explains, the impacts of creating a Web of Things may be immense:

It would be the current data explosion, times itself. A projected 24 billion simultaneous devices by the year 2020, including RFID tags on shipping crates, heart rate monitors, GPS devices, smartphone firmware, automobile maintenance systems, and yes, not a joke, earrings may become more socially active than any teenage human being presently alive. Tens of billions of devices, billions of messages per hour.

Thus, if like me, you're obsessed with the number and location of every single pair of green-and-red Flashing Blinky Lights Christmas earrings in the Western Hemisphere, the Web of Things could be a truly wonderful development. But there's far more to its potential. Not only could devices be tracked, but they also could be controlled, either individually or en masse, and networked to interact with one another, with or without human direction. The advent of the wallet-sized, energy-efficient supercomputer-on-a-chip, which reportedly can run 100 billion operations per second on less power than a cell phone uses, may transform many of today's dumb objects into extremely smart ones, capable of doing all sorts of stuff that only people used to be able to do. Instead of just remote-control cars, for example, we could have an urban environment in which vehicles, stoplights, sidewalks and the road itself have sentient capabilities and talk to one another and interact. Or you might have a pair of brown pants that send a message to your iPhone, reminding you to take your pale green shirt to the laundry, because the bright blue one in your closet would look horrible in combination with them. Your pants also might be able to communicate with that big plate of cheese fries that you're about to scarf down and calculate just how much they're going to have to stretch at the waistline to accommodate your girth afterward.

This morphing of everyday inanimate objects into active participants -- and even collaborators -- might totally rock both our civilization and our very perception of reality. As Internet of Things official Gerard Santucci notes in this essay, what yesterday was a chair or a Cuisinart tomorrow may be a "social object" that will start to assume some of the qualities that we now associate with personhood.

Our apprehension of the reality will be deeply affected by the metamorphosis of objects. Our relationship to electronic devices has changed so radically in the last few years that designers are beginning to think about our attachments to smart devices such as smartphones and tablets. The idea seems weird: how can we love an electronic device made of glass, silicon and plastic? Smart devices are becoming an extension of ourselves -- not in the sense that an object says something about what it is (cybernetic dimension), which technology supports it (semantic dimension), whom we want to be by owning it (semiological dimension), but as an actual part of our conscious self (relational dimension). Computers, mobile phones, tablets and e-readers do something that no car, garment or toaster can do (at least so far): they tell us things we never knew, like the quickest way to reach our destination, where to get a discount or where our friends are right now. So it is not surprising that people feel lost or actually grieve when they lose a personal electronic device. As the frame of a smart device keeps getting smaller, the 'window' gets larger and clearer.

In some ways, we might be creating for ourselves an electronic version of the sort of animist world that ancient peoples envisioned, in which not just humans but everything -- animals, plants, rocks, mountains and rivers, and even phenomena such as thunderstorms -- was sentient and possessed a spirit. But we also might be devising a techno-dystopia in which the objects that surround us could function as the ultimate means of totalitarian control. In George Orwell's 1984, the government sought to thwart political dissent by eliminating the words that made it possible to express such ideas from the language. But with a Web of Things, a dictator might be able to program the objects around us so that they would prevent a rebellion. Keyboards might refuse to type a protest. The brick that a protester threw through the police station window might inform upon him. Convenience and commerce might enslave us.

So what do you think? Is the Web of Things a good idea, or should we keep our coffee pots unwired? Post your opinion below.

Image Credits: Rune Hellestad/Corbis |