The IEEE Computer Society has released its 2022 report, which outlines future disruptive technologies and the progress being made on them today. Unsurprisingly, the Internet of Things features prominently in the 23 areas that the reports outlines, compiled by nine “technical leaders of the IEEE CS society,” and spanning 163 pages.
The report is free download, and well worth your perusal. While the 160 pages will no doubt be too in-depth for some, you only need to take a cursory look to see the impact that IoT has on the future of society. Intrinsically IoT topics that are covered include high-performance computing, machine learning, big data and analytics, cloud computing, and devices and nanotechnology.
Introducing the report in a post on the Wired website, IEEE CS president Dejan Milojicic writes “at the foundation of our report is our understanding that by 2022, we will be well into a phase where intelligence becomes seamless and ubiquitous to those who can afford and use state-of-the-art information technology. At the heart of the ‘seamless intelligence’ revolution is seamless networking, where the transition from one network device to another is transparent and uninterrupted. To achieve seamlessness and realize logical end-to-end connectivity, we’ll need communications to run independently on top of any form of physical networking, regardless of device or location.”
The report itself expands on this seamless intelligence scenario, saying “computing devices – from the very small, such as wearable devices and chips embedded under the skin, to the computers inside our mobile devices, laptops, desktops, home servers, TV sets, and refrigerators, to the computing cloud that we reach via the internet – are interconnected via different communication and networking technologies.”
“Together, they form an intelligent mesh,” continues the report, “a computing and communication ecosystem that augments reality with information and intelligence gathered from our fingertips, eyes, ears, and other senses, and even directly interfaced into our brain waves.”
“Through virtualized end-to-end connectivity, total integration of all the ecosystem devices that cater to our specific needs can be achieved. This new world will require sophisticated intelligent coordination software; voice, image, and motion recognition will transform human-computer interfaces into a seamless interaction between the user and all the computing devices in that person’s life.”
While IoT only gets 4 pages to itself, the hyperconnected world that is central to the report’s tone is inherently an IoT-centric world. Nonetheless, in its dedicated section, the report asks where the multitude of sensors and actuators in the IoT will be deployed. It answers “certainly, by 2020, many heretofore manual business processes will have been automated, whether via active devices built into products and supply chains or via external sensors such as cameras.”
The report rightly picks up on the more present danger of privacy and IoT. It asks “do you really want the ‘cloud’ to know where you are right now, with whom you are talking, and who else is around? Numerous commercial opportunities are raised by such monitoring, making it of interest to many businesses, but such monitoring is also rife for abuse, as with stalkers hounding someone or profilers using the data to update credit reports. Yes you can measure your activity levels, and such information will be invaluable to your doctor, but what if your health insurance rates rise because you didn’t move around enough last month?”
In terms of disruption to adoption, the report notes “concerns with privacy and security will affect the IoT’s growth and acceptance, particularly in lieu of differences in government actions and in the legal environments of the US versus Europe versus Asia.” It also asks what business models will arise to justify the cost of the back-end computational power required to provide these services to users, as after all a profit needs to be made to incentivize businesses to move the industry forwards.
In summary, the report writes “the IoT is here to stay, driven, among others, by device technology advances; the opportunities created by the billions of smartphones with their rich in-built sensors; Internet connectivity, the new functionalities it enables; and business reasons, such as the desire to reduce cost through automation reduced loss/wastage and shorter durations for supply chains.”
Nanotechnology is also covered in the report, which looks at the potential for autonomous nanomachines and their potential to act as an augmented immune system in the body. “Imagine your life being saved by a custom-designed medical machine made from particles 50,000 times as small as a single strand of your hair.”
As nanomachines operate at an atomic or molecular level, there is actually not a lot of intelligence required for the machine itself – which then acts as pre-programmed tool inside the body. The IoT side of this occurs when a chip or wearable is able to act as a hub for the nanomachines to report to, or to actively analyze their status. This sort of system would put the quantified-self of today’s wearables to shame, and would massively improve the quality of health of those able to afford the service – and the report says that we might see the beginnings of these self-analyzing and self-healing technologies by 2022.
“In the future that we envision, multicore CPU efficiency will allow us to recharge our smartphones just once a month. The IoT will let us dress in clothes that monitor all our activities. Nanotechnology will enable lives to be saved by digestible cameras and machines. And amid the exponential growth of large data repositories will be increasing concerns about balancing convenience and privacy,” writes Milojicic in Wired.