11 ms·

The Internet of Things Will Be the World's Biggest Robot

134 points by mariuz 11y ago

tls 11y ago
I have acutally kicked this idea around 4 or 5 years ago of A "WSW" but more so in a sense that modularity would have been the groundworks for such a revolution. Modularity. Modules, taking the scale of what cpus on the phones have to what the cpus in the late 90's till now had... interoperability... it is just not there yet. Infact it stagnated.
- DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
  ... interoperability ... a lot has changed in the last months alone. there are several standards ready for IoT (ETSI M2M) [0], some are still being drafted (W3C Web of Things "WoT")[1]. Where I still see lot of room for improvement in standards is for totally radically new use-cases. Standardization guys are usually industry representatives from bigger companies who think about inter-op (and to a lesser extent use-cases). But many use-cases in IoT transcend or even threaten the business models of what the bigger players have built their power/dominance on (they prefer sustainability over disruption -- god I hate those buzzwords). Therefore smaller innovators (individuals or garage start-ups) who have radical ideas such as building a decentralized business model (maybe using cryptocurrencies or blockchaining and not driven by harvesting user-data or advocate strong privacy) usually don't have the resources or time to put one of their staff into the slow-moving standardization bodies to make/defend their case. Though the W3 is extremely open compared to others and even there are official members who vote behind closed doors, ... if enough contributors bring ideas in the open discussion groups, then these points too might get standardized. The biggest problem though is standardizing security. It is no coincidence that most IETF drafts especially older ones and official RFC's have under "Security" a note that says "to be done". Thinking ahead what might become a design problem later is hard and depends on how the standard later gets understood by the industry. But more important there aren't enough people who understand security in standards groups. That is not just a standards problem though and more of a disease of our industry. Just look at most web developers and have them explain how XSS/SQL-injection works ... or ask an Embedded engineer who is used to building non-connected appliances to think about remote exploitable buffer overflows after they connects the thing via a CoAP proxy to the WWW ... Yes you'd assume they know that in detail but reality is usually most have no idea - not because it's hard but because we are not incentivized by making it extra secure (security often is a useless feature unfortunately only indirectly affecting your financial bottom line (when sh1t hits the proverbial fan)). [0] http://www.etsi.org/technologies-clusters/technologies/m2m http://www.etsi.org/technologies-clusters/technologies/m2m [1] https://github.com/w3c/web-of-things-framework https://github.com/w3c/web-of-things-framework EDIT: typos (possibly even grammar mistakes gasp)
moron4hire 11y ago
The internet of things won't be anything unless someone can figure out a better user story than "turn your house lights on and off from anywhere!"
- vdnkh 11y ago
  The "Internet of Things" is to M2M as "Data Science" is to Statistics. There are some differences but on the whole, it's a sexy rebranding of an unsexy industry. I'm a dev working at an industrial monitoring company making websites to our telemetry data. It's a real problem in a lucrative industry which has received a bit of a windfall with the rise of helium ISO shipping.
- thearn4 11y ago
  Pretty much this. Even though I say this as someone who built a home automation system that can do this, it is a bit niche and more of a hobby than anything thats really practical to most people. And then when I see hypothetical discussions about smart appliances ("a fridge that can automatically order food when you're low!", "a dishwasher that can tweet when the dishes are done"), the thing that I really want are open-source hackable everyday appliances, not feature-rich ones. E.g., I want to be able to confidently replace a busted controller in my dishwasher without necessarily having to shell out $100 to maytag for one that was only produced for a single year. Sadly, yes, this is a wish born out of experience.
  - hawski 11y ago
    Would it make sense to have single device with microphones that could detect specific sound (i.e. beep of dishwasher) and also could distinguish it from other specific sound (i.e. beep of washing machine) and than push this as a notification via whatever means (i.e. twitter)? With few microphones it could detect direction of sound and than it could learn which appliance makes which sound. Not that I see a need for something like this, but existence of such device could deter a bit companies from shoving such things to every appliance.
    - DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
noja 11y ago
The world's biggest botnet too.
dovdov 11y ago
Come for the plant hydrator, stay because.. skynet.
late2part 11y ago
My friend Mike O'Dell quoted someone as calling it the "Inherently Dangerous Internet Of Things."
- username223 11y ago
  Apt. Microsoft actually seems to care about support, compatibility, and security, but it took years (a decade?) of Windows getting hacked for them to finally get serious about security. After another decade or so they're still a ways from fixing the problem, and part of that "fix" is telling people perfectly happy with their current Windows 7/8 systems to go to hell. The IDIoT means appliance and car makers get to repeat this same slow learning curve, but on both client and server. In a decade or so, buyers will force them care about fixing their buggy, unsupported, insecure software (both client- and server-side this time). In another decade, they will be at around Windows 10 levels of support and security. Oh, yeah, and a hacked car or HVAC system can kill you much deader than a hacked PC.
ep103 11y ago
Alright, I'll be the one to say it: Skynet
monkmartinez 11y ago
Obligatory: https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit
EdSharkey 11y ago
Utopias require a slave class. Having autonomous robots doing most/all manual labor sounds pretty good - AS LONG AS they aren't all phoning home to their corporate overlords every 30msec. When are we going to start demanding devices that are untethered from a mothership and run from home computers?
- jonathantm 11y ago
  > When are we going to start demanding devices that are untethered from a mothership and run from home computers? When "we" understand the value of Free and Open Source Software. Some do, some don't, some don't yet, some never will.
  - Outdoorsman 11y ago
    Not intended in any way as a rebuttal of your point, but considering both sides of an issue is generally worthwhile: There's the potential for DIY open source misuse, with negative consequences: Here, a poster's bad experience with a properly-installed OEM product prompts a "warning", directed at the open-source DIY community... https://community.particle.io/t/spark-powered-thermostats-burning-down-the-house-baby/2204 https://community.particle.io/t/spark-powered-thermostats-bu... The poster referenced this DIY... http://blog.particle.io/2014/01/17/open-source-thermostat/?redirected=true http://blog.particle.io/2014/01/17/open-source-thermostat/?r... I'm an open source fan, but realize it's not a panacea, in and of itself...great care and a full understanding of potential negative consequences is only prudent... Personally, I'm content with nursing along older appliances that were made well...but, I'm a bit of a handyman, and hate to give up on any machine until I'm convinced it's totally worn out, so IoT is unlikely to invade my home on a large scale any time soon...
    - winfred 11y ago
      "One such story was from a couple who were out of town when their furnace went nuts and raised the temperature in the house high enough that it melted every piece of plastic in the entire home." There's just no way that a home furnace can generate enough heat to do that. Sounds like scaremongering to me.
mc32 11y ago
Calling the iot a robot is a bit clumsy. This label will do the opposite of the intent, the prudent exposition of the iot as the largest unobtrusive surreptitious surveillance system of all. total information awareness come true. Labeling it as a robot will rather make people discount the idea. "A robot? That man's crazy. Little things interconnected do not make a godzilla-like world stomping and destroying robot! Nuts!" To be sure, putting all your industrial scada equipment on the public net could result in consequences similar to having a Godzilla running amok.
JBiserkov 11y ago
SMART - Surveillance Marketed As Revolutionary Technology
ommunist 11y ago
What a nightmare - millions of fridges DDoSing nuclear power stations...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Animats 11y ago
How long until it deliberately kills someone?
- bdamm 11y ago
  Weapon bearing drones?
jefurii 11y ago
Rather than IoT, I'd like to have networked Things under my control. The problem is not that they're networked but that they all want to phone home to central services.
- Outdoorsman 11y ago
  Agreed...further, I'd want to be able to turn them off, easily...I'm stingy with bandwidth and giving away data related to my personal preferences... The only feature I want (or really need) in an "appliance" , of any sort, is easy access to diagnostics if it fails... I'd prefer appliances with something like OBD (II, III), installed in automobiles...
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  I use a few IoT devices, and have them on a non-internet network. Unfortunately it requires me looking into each product first to see if it phones home, and deciding which features I want to give up by blocking that.
  - ryanlol 11y ago
    Well, at least most of the protocols are really really easy to RE.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  An Intranet of Things?
  - swsieber 11y ago
    Yes. But then most of the monetization opportunity is gone for the makers. Here is an opportunity for kickstarter and open source things to shine.
- cheez 11y ago
  May I give a "collector's" point of view? I recently added a sort of phone home functionality to an app that runs on the client's network and the only goal here is to ensure that the people who use the software get value out of it. It helps me decide what to focus on and what matters to the customers. It's not a substitute for picking up the phone, but it allows me to have more meaningful conversations when I do so.
carapace 11y ago
Thank goodness I'm not the only one who gets this. (I know how that sounds but damnit I feel very lonely most of the time.) Conceptually speaking, there is only one machine. Two "independent" machines, once coupled, now form one machine. And in the real world all the machines are already coupled. Also, I feel like people should watch "Maximum Overdrive" and "Demon Seed".
dasil003 11y ago
For some definition of robot. I'm also a fan of Gaia Theory, but it doesn't mean that the Earthly ecosystem is an organism in the same sense as the individual flora and fauna.
- ajcarpy2005 11y ago
  I am reading into your comment but I am thinking you are considering that the transient and seemingly non-stable nature of a lot of human and animal activity implies that Gaia cannot be an Earth-level macroscopic scale organism comparable to the human body. I think that if you consider the replaceable and transient nature of the molecules and cells in traditional organisms, you will see more correspondences between the two. Also imagine how at the microscopic level (even macroscopic level), humans and animals change quite a bit day-to-day..even moment to moment. So the busyness and seemingly "unstatic" nature of Earth-at-large is no reason to think of it too much differently than a traditional organism. And considering two further things makes for even more interesting conversation: 1) there's no super-clear distinction between life and death..there's a massive difference in function and activity along the development and decay cycles that are possible for animals. 2) Animals without limbs or with added tools(extensions of our limbs) are quite workable. This is only meant to add to your conversation; I'm not really detracting because I agree it's not in the same sense but rather a different class of a being. Oh, and one more thing: Animals' collections of physical cells are also home to a large number of cells from a WIDE VARIETY of different "species" of bacteria and viruses..so many of which can basically take a person either up or down in health by a large factor. So this is analogous to the Earth which is home to a great diversity of humans, animals, plants, and so on. Beautiful really. Except for that which isn't.
jmnicolas 11y ago
Apart from the "Minority Report" considerations I'm wondering how long this crazy addiction to electronics can be environmentally sustainable. I can't say I'm optimistic about it.
- IsaacL 11y ago
  Which part of them is particularly environmentally sustainable? The metals and plastics used in their manufacture is pretty minimal compared to cars or home appliances. Their power consumption is low compared to heating or lighting (a macbook consumes power equivalent to about two lightbulbs, and most devices use less). Earth metals represent probably the biggest environmental impact of consumer electronics. They're not actually rare, just expensive to mine, so there isn't an issue of sustainability. (As in, the earth metals aren't going to run out any time soon. There's some nasty environmental damage in the vicinity of the mines, but that's limited to a particular area). I'm trying to fathom the reasoning behind this comment. Is it that because electronics are really useful and beneficial, they must have a proportional cost?
  - jmnicolas 11y ago
    Did you mean "unsustainable" in your first sentence ? It seems to me that even at our current level of mass consumerism our lifestyles wouldn't be sustainable for more than a few decades. I'll give it to you that it's more a hunch than a an opinion backed by facts. You're talking about cars or home appliances but generally we have a few of them. Each one of us will probably have thousands of IOT "things". Billions of humans having thousands of things that are discarded and replaced by new ones when they fail or are not modern enough is not, in my opinion, a recipe for sustainability. For the record I counted 17 sensors just for my house alarm and I didn't go overboard, if I hadn't be budget constrained I would have put much more than that.
    - pavel_lishin 11y ago
      How often are you replacing those sensors?
chaostheory 11y ago
> The World-Sized Web -- can I call it WSW? I call it IFTTT
- iokanuon 11y ago
  What about... World Wide Web?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

134 points by mariuz 11y ago

tls 11y ago

I have acutally kicked this idea around 4 or 5 years ago of A "WSW" but more so in a sense that modularity would have been the groundworks for such a revolution. Modularity. Modules, taking the scale of what cpus on the phones have to what the cpus in the late 90's till now had... interoperability... it is just not there yet. Infact it stagnated.

DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
... interoperability ... a lot has changed in the last months alone. there are several standards ready for IoT (ETSI M2M) [0], some are still being drafted (W3C Web of Things "WoT")[1]. Where I still see lot of room for improvement in standards is for totally radically new use-cases. Standardization guys are usually industry representatives from bigger companies who think about inter-op (and to a lesser extent use-cases). But many use-cases in IoT transcend or even threaten the business models of what the bigger players have built their power/dominance on (they prefer sustainability over disruption -- god I hate those buzzwords). Therefore smaller innovators (individuals or garage start-ups) who have radical ideas such as building a decentralized business model (maybe using cryptocurrencies or blockchaining and not driven by harvesting user-data or advocate strong privacy) usually don't have the resources or time to put one of their staff into the slow-moving standardization bodies to make/defend their case. Though the W3 is extremely open compared to others and even there are official members who vote behind closed doors, ... if enough contributors bring ideas in the open discussion groups, then these points too might get standardized. The biggest problem though is standardizing security. It is no coincidence that most IETF drafts especially older ones and official RFC's have under "Security" a note that says "to be done". Thinking ahead what might become a design problem later is hard and depends on how the standard later gets understood by the industry. But more important there aren't enough people who understand security in standards groups. That is not just a standards problem though and more of a disease of our industry. Just look at most web developers and have them explain how XSS/SQL-injection works ... or ask an Embedded engineer who is used to building non-connected appliances to think about remote exploitable buffer overflows after they connects the thing via a CoAP proxy to the WWW ... Yes you'd assume they know that in detail but reality is usually most have no idea - not because it's hard but because we are not incentivized by making it extra secure (security often is a useless feature unfortunately only indirectly affecting your financial bottom line (when sh1t hits the proverbial fan)). [0] http://www.etsi.org/technologies-clusters/technologies/m2m http://www.etsi.org/technologies-clusters/technologies/m2m [1] https://github.com/w3c/web-of-things-framework https://github.com/w3c/web-of-things-framework EDIT: typos (possibly even grammar mistakes gasp)

moron4hire 11y ago

The internet of things won't be anything unless someone can figure out a better user story than "turn your house lights on and off from anywhere!"

vdnkh 11y ago
The "Internet of Things" is to M2M as "Data Science" is to Statistics. There are some differences but on the whole, it's a sexy rebranding of an unsexy industry. I'm a dev working at an industrial monitoring company making websites to our telemetry data. It's a real problem in a lucrative industry which has received a bit of a windfall with the rise of helium ISO shipping.
thearn4 11y ago
Pretty much this. Even though I say this as someone who built a home automation system that can do this, it is a bit niche and more of a hobby than anything thats really practical to most people. And then when I see hypothetical discussions about smart appliances ("a fridge that can automatically order food when you're low!", "a dishwasher that can tweet when the dishes are done"), the thing that I really want are open-source hackable everyday appliances, not feature-rich ones. E.g., I want to be able to confidently replace a busted controller in my dishwasher without necessarily having to shell out $100 to maytag for one that was only produced for a single year. Sadly, yes, this is a wish born out of experience.
- hawski 11y ago
  Would it make sense to have single device with microphones that could detect specific sound (i.e. beep of dishwasher) and also could distinguish it from other specific sound (i.e. beep of washing machine) and than push this as a notification via whatever means (i.e. twitter)? With few microphones it could detect direction of sound and than it could learn which appliance makes which sound. Not that I see a need for something like this, but existence of such device could deter a bit companies from shoving such things to every appliance.
  - DyslexicAtheist 11y ago

noja 11y ago

The world's biggest botnet too.

dovdov 11y ago

Come for the plant hydrator, stay because.. skynet.

late2part 11y ago

My friend Mike O'Dell quoted someone as calling it the "Inherently Dangerous Internet Of Things."

username223 11y ago
Apt. Microsoft actually seems to care about support, compatibility, and security, but it took years (a decade?) of Windows getting hacked for them to finally get serious about security. After another decade or so they're still a ways from fixing the problem, and part of that "fix" is telling people perfectly happy with their current Windows 7/8 systems to go to hell. The IDIoT means appliance and car makers get to repeat this same slow learning curve, but on both client and server. In a decade or so, buyers will force them care about fixing their buggy, unsupported, insecure software (both client- and server-side this time). In another decade, they will be at around Windows 10 levels of support and security. Oh, yeah, and a hacked car or HVAC system can kill you much deader than a hacked PC.

ep103 11y ago

Alright, I'll be the one to say it: Skynet

monkmartinez 11y ago

Obligatory: https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit

EdSharkey 11y ago

Utopias require a slave class. Having autonomous robots doing most/all manual labor sounds pretty good - AS LONG AS they aren't all phoning home to their corporate overlords every 30msec. When are we going to start demanding devices that are untethered from a mothership and run from home computers?

jonathantm 11y ago
> When are we going to start demanding devices that are untethered from a mothership and run from home computers? When "we" understand the value of Free and Open Source Software. Some do, some don't, some don't yet, some never will.
- Outdoorsman 11y ago
  Not intended in any way as a rebuttal of your point, but considering both sides of an issue is generally worthwhile: There's the potential for DIY open source misuse, with negative consequences: Here, a poster's bad experience with a properly-installed OEM product prompts a "warning", directed at the open-source DIY community... https://community.particle.io/t/spark-powered-thermostats-burning-down-the-house-baby/2204 https://community.particle.io/t/spark-powered-thermostats-bu... The poster referenced this DIY... http://blog.particle.io/2014/01/17/open-source-thermostat/?redirected=true http://blog.particle.io/2014/01/17/open-source-thermostat/?r... I'm an open source fan, but realize it's not a panacea, in and of itself...great care and a full understanding of potential negative consequences is only prudent... Personally, I'm content with nursing along older appliances that were made well...but, I'm a bit of a handyman, and hate to give up on any machine until I'm convinced it's totally worn out, so IoT is unlikely to invade my home on a large scale any time soon...
  - winfred 11y ago
    "One such story was from a couple who were out of town when their furnace went nuts and raised the temperature in the house high enough that it melted every piece of plastic in the entire home." There's just no way that a home furnace can generate enough heat to do that. Sounds like scaremongering to me.

mc32 11y ago

Calling the iot a robot is a bit clumsy. This label will do the opposite of the intent, the prudent exposition of the iot as the largest unobtrusive surreptitious surveillance system of all. total information awareness come true. Labeling it as a robot will rather make people discount the idea. "A robot? That man's crazy. Little things interconnected do not make a godzilla-like world stomping and destroying robot! Nuts!" To be sure, putting all your industrial scada equipment on the public net could result in consequences similar to having a Godzilla running amok.

JBiserkov 11y ago

SMART - Surveillance Marketed As Revolutionary Technology

ommunist 11y ago

What a nightmare - millions of fridges DDoSing nuclear power stations...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Animats 11y ago

How long until it deliberately kills someone?

bdamm 11y ago
Weapon bearing drones?

jefurii 11y ago

Rather than IoT, I'd like to have networked Things under my control. The problem is not that they're networked but that they all want to phone home to central services.

Outdoorsman 11y ago
Agreed...further, I'd want to be able to turn them off, easily...I'm stingy with bandwidth and giving away data related to my personal preferences... The only feature I want (or really need) in an "appliance" , of any sort, is easy access to diagnostics if it fails... I'd prefer appliances with something like OBD (II, III), installed in automobiles...
CaptSpify 11y ago
I use a few IoT devices, and have them on a non-internet network. Unfortunately it requires me looking into each product first to see if it phones home, and deciding which features I want to give up by blocking that.
- ryanlol 11y ago
  Well, at least most of the protocols are really really easy to RE.
pavel_lishin 11y ago
An Intranet of Things?
- swsieber 11y ago
  Yes. But then most of the monetization opportunity is gone for the makers. Here is an opportunity for kickstarter and open source things to shine.
cheez 11y ago
May I give a "collector's" point of view? I recently added a sort of phone home functionality to an app that runs on the client's network and the only goal here is to ensure that the people who use the software get value out of it. It helps me decide what to focus on and what matters to the customers. It's not a substitute for picking up the phone, but it allows me to have more meaningful conversations when I do so.

carapace 11y ago

Thank goodness I'm not the only one who gets this. (I know how that sounds but damnit I feel very lonely most of the time.) Conceptually speaking, there is only one machine. Two "independent" machines, once coupled, now form one machine. And in the real world all the machines are already coupled. Also, I feel like people should watch "Maximum Overdrive" and "Demon Seed".

dasil003 11y ago

For some definition of robot. I'm also a fan of Gaia Theory, but it doesn't mean that the Earthly ecosystem is an organism in the same sense as the individual flora and fauna.

ajcarpy2005 11y ago
I am reading into your comment but I am thinking you are considering that the transient and seemingly non-stable nature of a lot of human and animal activity implies that Gaia cannot be an Earth-level macroscopic scale organism comparable to the human body. I think that if you consider the replaceable and transient nature of the molecules and cells in traditional organisms, you will see more correspondences between the two. Also imagine how at the microscopic level (even macroscopic level), humans and animals change quite a bit day-to-day..even moment to moment. So the busyness and seemingly "unstatic" nature of Earth-at-large is no reason to think of it too much differently than a traditional organism. And considering two further things makes for even more interesting conversation: 1) there's no super-clear distinction between life and death..there's a massive difference in function and activity along the development and decay cycles that are possible for animals. 2) Animals without limbs or with added tools(extensions of our limbs) are quite workable. This is only meant to add to your conversation; I'm not really detracting because I agree it's not in the same sense but rather a different class of a being. Oh, and one more thing: Animals' collections of physical cells are also home to a large number of cells from a WIDE VARIETY of different "species" of bacteria and viruses..so many of which can basically take a person either up or down in health by a large factor. So this is analogous to the Earth which is home to a great diversity of humans, animals, plants, and so on. Beautiful really. Except for that which isn't.

jmnicolas 11y ago

Apart from the "Minority Report" considerations I'm wondering how long this crazy addiction to electronics can be environmentally sustainable. I can't say I'm optimistic about it.

IsaacL 11y ago
Which part of them is particularly environmentally sustainable? The metals and plastics used in their manufacture is pretty minimal compared to cars or home appliances. Their power consumption is low compared to heating or lighting (a macbook consumes power equivalent to about two lightbulbs, and most devices use less). Earth metals represent probably the biggest environmental impact of consumer electronics. They're not actually rare, just expensive to mine, so there isn't an issue of sustainability. (As in, the earth metals aren't going to run out any time soon. There's some nasty environmental damage in the vicinity of the mines, but that's limited to a particular area). I'm trying to fathom the reasoning behind this comment. Is it that because electronics are really useful and beneficial, they must have a proportional cost?
- jmnicolas 11y ago
  Did you mean "unsustainable" in your first sentence ? It seems to me that even at our current level of mass consumerism our lifestyles wouldn't be sustainable for more than a few decades. I'll give it to you that it's more a hunch than a an opinion backed by facts. You're talking about cars or home appliances but generally we have a few of them. Each one of us will probably have thousands of IOT "things". Billions of humans having thousands of things that are discarded and replaced by new ones when they fail or are not modern enough is not, in my opinion, a recipe for sustainability. For the record I counted 17 sensors just for my house alarm and I didn't go overboard, if I hadn't be budget constrained I would have put much more than that.
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    How often are you replacing those sensors?

chaostheory 11y ago

> The World-Sized Web -- can I call it WSW? I call it IFTTT

iokanuon 11y ago
What about... World Wide Web?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]