The Pew reports were undertaken to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. The latest report is an analysis of opinions about the responses of 1,600 industry insiders to the question of where the IoT would be in 2025. Pew calls it a canvass, as the selected respondents chose to opt in to the service.
The vast majority of respondents (83%) felt that the IoT would bring ‘widespread and beneficial effects by 2025.’ Pew identifies a number of themes that ran throughout the responses, which we will run through below.
The first theme is that the number of deployed devices will increase significantly by 2025. Even those who maintain that there will be negative outcomes, or that the positives will outweigh the disadvantages, do not dispute that there will be an enormous amount of connected devices.
Many felt that a large part of IoT would be incentives to try and influence consumer behavior ‘ to make a purchase, to work differently, to behave more efficiently or healthily. With the quantifiable self, where every statistic can be measured and collated, insurance policies and premiums will change to reflect individual behavior, advertising strategies will be altered using feedback gathered from customer reactions. For some, that is an utterly despicable and Orwellian future, and in the wake of the NSA scandal, it’s a perfectly understandable stance to adopt. For other respondents, it is almost utopian.
There also a healthy level of skepticism prevalent in the responses. Two choice excerpts include Bill St. Arnaud and Karl Fogel, a green internet consultant and president of QuestionCopyright.org respectively. St. Arnaud notes that ‘IoT has been in the red zone of the hypometer for over a decade now. Yes, there will be many niche applications, but it will not be the next big thing.’ Fogel is more aggressive, saying ‘No, yuck, we don’t need this, and most people aren’t asking for it. I’ve never been quite clear on where the demand is supposedly coming from. The scarce resource will continue to be human attention. There is a limit to the usefulness of devices that are worn in public that demand more user attention than they are worth.’
The second general theme was that the realities of the emerging data drenched world raise substantial concerns about privacy and people’s ability to control their own lives, as seen with the issue of the quantified self above. Nick Wreden of the University of Kuala Lumpur said ‘I don’t like this, but people have shown over and over again that they are willing to trade their souls away for a ‘$1 off’ coupon.’ Visions of a prison-like web of surveillance worry many of the respondents in this section, and psychotherapist Aaron Balick feared that outsourcing decision-making to algorithms could make humanity lose sight of its needs, endlessly deferring to a machine. We here at RIoT think that at the very least IoT developments will inspire quite a few dystopian Hollywood blockbusters.
We can blitz through the third theme here, which found a general consensus that there would be huge advances in voice and touch control, especially so through contextual eye tracking and improvements in sensors. Few expect that brain-to-network connectivity will be commonplace by 2025.
Fourth is the concern that the complicated nature of consumer products will swiftly outmatch the humans who need to fix them when they break. On a micro level, it means getting locked out of your house when your super-secure door fails a firmware update. ‘We will live in a world where many things won’t work, and nobody will know how to fix them,’ as Howard Rheingold puts it.
The fifth concern was that those who don’t want to or who can’t be connected will become disenfranchised and isolated ‘ the tech-haves and have-nots. There is the fear that those left behind will be ‘increasingly invisible and increasingly seen as less than full humans.’
The sixth theme is the unanticipated impacts on society that IoT may bring about. There are concerns about losing your personal space to intrusive advertising, countered by the hope that private and encrypted personal clouds could improve privacy while redefining personal space. Technology could cut a personalized swathe through the connected world, broadcasting personal preferences to unwanted advertisements or intrusions. The social reactions to technology, like the violent episodes inspired by Google Glass, will disappear as people learn how to react to visible wearable tech.
Google’s VP Vint Cerf thinks that ‘the benefit is that these appliances will be coordinated to improve our daily lives. The risk is that inimical forces may gain control and create serious problems. Continuous monitoring will be a powerful element in our lives,’ for good or bad depending on the outcome.
An augmented reality where data overlays of every object remove the mystery from the world is another concern, as the ability to scan anything in the world to learn about it will be as important a shift from a world in which you could get lost to a world with ubiquitous GPS handsets. Will society become dumber if all-encompassing fact is only a swipe away?
Blurring of people and their machines is already underway according to some, where we talk to our machines and they speak back to us. If a machine can hold a conversation, and if language is a defining human characteristic, to what extent can we call the machine human? Is it then morally sound to verbally abuse your AI servant that you carry about on your wrist?
If health apps encourage people to live incredibly healthy lives, balanced by sensors that inform us of impending illness, vital signs and dietary requirements, what strain will the rapidly ageing population place on a world in which more and more jobs are automated? Will ageing far longer than we do now uncover more traumatic and socially damaging diseases?
We’ve tried to condense some of the most interesting parts of 66 pages of personal responses to the connected world and the future we are headed towards. While a lot of it feels like Sunday reading, the gut reactions that Pew has collated are indicative of not only the massively diverse range of analytical and economic forecasts, but the myriad of human and emotional responses to the possibilities that are found in IoT advances.