7 ms·

IoT is a fad. I have yet to see very many convincing arguments on why my house needs to be online. The existing products (locks, sensors, smoke detectors) are b

by dexwiz 10y ago

IoT is a fad. I have yet to see very many convincing arguments on why my house needs to be online. The existing products (locks, sensors, smoke detectors) are barely different from existing home security products that have been on the market for years. The functionality of Echo/OnHub is largely covered by smartphones. They promise integration with other home IoT devices that do not exist yet. People are very hesitant to buy new appliances/home products. The last major change to the American home was the television, and that was ~50 years ago. Desktops had their day, but have been largely replaced by Laptops/Smartphones for many consumers. Adoption of new home appliances and technologies is glacially slow. Also newer electronics have shown they need replaced/upgraded every 2-5 years. You are going to be hard pressed to sell the idea that the consumer needs to replace all their light switches and smoke detectors even every 10 years. I barely replace light bulbs at that rate now. Cars about the only place where the IoT call home paradigm works. They are complicated machines that need semi regular maintenance. Placing sensors all over it makes sense. Trading updates for telemetry is attractive because a cars computer needs updates like any other computer. But I don't need a fridge that senses when I am low on milk, when I can just as easily look inside it and tell for myself. EDIT: I think I should clarify that home IoT is a fad. Having machines feed back telemetry is useful, especially commercial machines with a service contract. The data is useful when its actionable. Data for the sake of data in the home is a waste.

jkot 10y ago
IoT will eventually happen, but for Smart Grid to reduce power usage. There is a potential to save 30% of energy cost.
- Animats 10y ago
  That doesn't need the "cloud". It just needs a broadcast signal telling your appliances the current price of electricity.
  - lucaspiller 10y ago
    It's not exactly the same, but in the UK, Economy 7 is effectively a low tech version of this. At night the price of electricity is cheaper, so electric storage heaters and boilers are switched on then to take advantage of the lower costs and reduce demand at peak times. Rather than using timers, it is controlled by a radio signal broadcast throughout the country. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
- savrajsingh 10y ago
  Check out Wattvision - it's like Fitbit for your house ;)
joezydeco 10y ago
IoT is a fad in the current way we're going about it. What's not a fad is getting devices to communicate their health and status to an upstream repository for things like predictive analytics. This is already happening in the B2B sector. It will reach the consumer sector next, but like you said it will take 2-3 consumer product cycles to make it real. It won't be about remote control or any of the barely useful use-cases you're seeing with fridges and door locks and water bottles. It will be knowing your home's A/C has two weeks of operation before it seizes up. It will be knowing your home's plumbing has frozen and burst while you were away.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dimino 10y ago
  The "TV in the refrigerator" IoT is definitely a fad, but you're right, there's a fundamental need to connect devices together and to a central managing/monitoring service.
  - discreteevent 10y ago
    There is also a fundamental need to have those devices be secure. Consumers take this for granted because they have been secure for so long. They don't know what's coming. And when they find out then there whole thing will probably blow up. It just takes a few companies to tarnish it for everybody else. The problem with IoT is the I
    - acdha 10y ago
      The problem is the lack of corporate liability. If they used some alternative to the internet we'd be reading about how it makes the SWIFT network look secure add long as the alternatives are “spend money and time doing it responsibly” or “ship it now with a strong EULA”.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    That stuff kills me when it's marketed like that. It's not IoT! Having a tablet or a TV or Twitter in your computer isn't IoT, it's just a shitty tablet, and it still required human intervention. That's literally the Internet we have right now. IoT would be your fridge talking to the store and telling them you need more milk, and then you get a shipment of milk. But that's infinitely harder than taping a tablet to a fridge, so Samsung sells us a tablet taped to a fridge and it's called IoT. Connected devices are not IoT. Marketing needs to learn that.
kilroy123 10y ago
I agree about everything being connected to the internet. However, I think no truly groundbreaking device has come out, yet. I bet money that one day, a truly useful device will eventually come out. Something, years later, we'll wonder how we ever lived without it. Like the iPhone did for smartphones.
andrewstuart2 10y ago
There are a few devices where there are good arguments for connectivity. An HVAC thermostat, for one, benefits as it's the most expensive consumer of electricity, so a smarter device (or access to external resources) makes sense. Additionally, the ability to control it remotely has a great benefit for "oh hey, I forgot to turn off the A/C before we left on our month-long trip." It could pay for itself right there. I really think IoT ought to be much more focused on a few high-value devices. Mostly, I think this is important because they have high value for end users but, as such, are also potentially targets for attacks, and by focusing on fewer devices they can hopefully be made much more secure.
jonlucc 10y ago
All valid points, but I think the products now are laying groundwork for the future. I really believe that at some point, the home will have more safety features and convenience because of IoT. I'm actually surprised that Nest failed to deliver more products. There will be some company that offers a wide range of products and has a huge marketing budget for explaining the use to people.
legulere 10y ago
The article isn't really good but the headline is spot on: "Smart technology is a solution looking for a problem" http://www.dezeen.com/2016/04/27/smart-technology-driverless-cars-interview-maarten-hajer-rotterdam-biennale-2016-curator-netherlands/ http://www.dezeen.com/2016/04/27/smart-technology-driverless...
maxerickson 10y ago
Alternatively, it's a feature not a product. My favorite example is garage doors. People won't pay $50 to retrofit a half assed automation onto their existing opener. When many openers come with wifi without much of a price premium, lots of people will start using the feature.
- hodgesrm 10y ago
  Just out of curiosity why would you want to open a garage door via the internet? If it somehow enables you to close the door without seeing what it might be closing on that sounds like a spectacularly bad idea.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Obstruction sensors and automatic reverse have been required for decades (in other words, the openers are already meant to be safe to operate without observation). Anyway, just knowing it is open can be useful.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I can imagine use cases. The most obvious is: "Siri/Alexa open the garage door." (assuming some established authentication mechanism) rather than dealing with the unique garage door remote. I can imagine others. "This is Alexa, it's 11pm and your garage door is still open. Should I close it?" and things in that vein. But those seem pretty marginal. I have very rarely left my garage door open by accident.
cgriswald 10y ago
I'm not sure it's a fad, but it is definitely not ready for prime time. I have a "smart washer" largely because the smarts came with the washer I wanted. The "smart" functionality is completely unusable. First, it can only be connected to the network via WPS. (And the reviewers for the smart phone app don't seem to be able to connect it even with WPS. I haven't tried.) Second, the actual functionality of the connected app is a joke. So why do they have smart functionality at all? My guess is marketing. Is anyone going to return their otherwise awesome washer because the smart functionality is crap? Probably not, since there is no washer or dryer with true smart functionality on the market. But having it on there as a feature might sell a couple units. On the other hand, while a refrigerator that detects when I'm out of milk is useless now, I can imagine a future in which it then orders the milk for me, so I never have to worry about it. I honestly can't stand doing inventory and ordering/shopping every week. I would love for that process to be automated.
- roywiggins 10y ago
  I think you've reinvented the milkman. Regular milk deliveries might be a little bit more inconvenient than automatically ordered milk, but it's vastly simpler.
  - nickonline 10y ago
    You're being ridiculously literal. What if you have milk but are out of orange juice or cheese or steak? Unless the 'milkman' is turning up with all these things on the of chance you're low on one this system is much more efficient.
- tajen 10y ago
  > detects when I'm out of milk That's a fad. I wouldn't be suprised if people just wanted to take a look inside their fridge while they're shopping, so a webcam at each level would be enough.
- daveguy 10y ago
  > I honestly can't stand doing inventory and ordering/shopping every week. I would love for that process to be automated. A beautiful fact about refrigerators is that they make for perfect whiteboard surfaces and they are magnetic. I take a picture of my fridge before I go shopping, on which I have written everything that needs to be purchased. A magnetic whiteboard marker with builtin eraser stays on the fridge. There is no way a "smart fridge" is going to catch up to that level of ease + utility any time soon.
jostmey 10y ago
You said it! I don't want a smart oven and a smart lamp. I just want stuff "that works". Digital devices take off when they have a killer application. So far I've seen nothing along these lines.
- knn 10y ago
  I will avoid buying 'smart' appliances for probably forever. Besides having mostly useless features, I'd rather not have another electronic probe in my life relaying all of the details of my life to everyone.
ctdonath 10y ago
The existing products (locks, sensors, smoke detectors) are barely different from existing home security products that have been on the market for years The existing products have miniscule market penetration, for decades, precisely because their networked integration is abysmal. IoT is yet another attempt to impose some order on the market, which is still focused on incompatibility as a way to retain customers rather than grow the market. There is ENORMOUS pent up demand for networked everything, if only a cheap universal standard arose and was accepted.
- dexwiz 10y ago
  I think that demand is from the companies and not the consumers. Stand in front of a Lowes in the Midwest and ask consumers who walk out if they would like whatever item they bought to be hooked up to the internet. I bet you would get more No's than Yes's.
steven2012 10y ago
Some IoT is a fad. But there are very useful things that you can do if you have many connected data devices and sensors at home. I have ~15 temperature sensors and door sensors that alert me when doors get opened. I was able to use that data to definitively measure the positive impact insulating my house had. I can tell when people enter or exit my house, and I also have ~10 cameras for security. If I get a notification that someone is around my house while I'm gone, I can call my local police department a lot faster than any alarm company. My Nest also tells me how long my furnace is on every day. Of course their data is useless so I constantly request and store this data in violation of their terms of services, because fuck Nest and their useless TOS. But with that I can make smarter decisions on how to save money in heating and I've halved my bill by manually adjusting my heating (not relying on their stupid algos). Do I need a fridge that tells me I'm out of eggs? No. But having metrics and data lets me as a homeowner make smarter decisions that save money.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  So you got a smart thermostat, wrote some code to hit an API, and do some fancy math to half your heating bill. Why could you not just turn your thermostat down 4 degrees for the same thing? I get that there might be some marginal gains you can get with tech ("A heat wave is coming tomorrow, let's shut off the furnace 1 hour early"), but it seems really small and crude compared to existing offline tech can do (look for leaky holes in your insulation, add 6" more blown insulation in your attic, etc"). Or for example replacing a 80% efficient with a 99% efficient furnace has a pretty huge impact. Does nest magic timing have more?
  - steven2012 10y ago
    The nest cost $250, insulation cost 10x that, and new furnace is 40x. I agree that insulation and upgrading the home would produce the nest results but my point is that the data is useful, not useless. I could shut my heating completely and save 100% but that misses the point. What I did was turn on the heating in the morning to a temperature that was comfortable and then shut it off so that by the time everyone left for work/school the temperature would still be acceptable but on the lower bounds. That saved about 45 mins of heating a day. Overnight as well I could see how my furnace behaved and tweaked based on that, etc. The key isn't just the nest but the other temp sensors so I have a complete idea of what my houses characteristics are.
yoodenvranx 10y ago
> IoT is a fad It is a fad because there is no common standard. Just imagine you could connect to all your devices (washing machine, heating system, warm water system, garage doors, TV and hifi) from the same app om your phone. And just imagine you could just go to your parents place and do they same thing there. Just imagine you could just buy some random LED bulbs from alibaba and they would just work in your home without thinking about the right standards. But all of this is just not possible because there is no common standard. I'd really like to buy some remote controllable LED bulbs and perhaps a remote for my heating system. But there are dozens of companies which offer the samw things but they don't work with each other... This is why home automation is not taking off. My parents are planning to build a new house and it will be 100% traditional without any fancy home automation stuff because there is no universal system.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  > Just imagine you could connect to all your devices (washing machine, heating system, warm water system, garage doors, TV and hifi) from the same app om your phone Why would I want to.
  - yoodenvranx 10y ago
    Well, to be honest: Nobody really needs this. But if this would work flawlessly then life could be just a bit more comfortable. For example I am laying currently on the bed and the light in the kitchen is still on. Yes, I could just get out of bed and walk over there, but if there would be an easy gui for this is my mobile it would be good because at the moment I am very lazy. A quite real problem I have in winter is the temperature in my sleeping room. Sometimes I wake up and it is either too warm or too cold and I have to get up and change the settings. Usually I then have the problem that I can not fall asleep again. If I could just press a button, I could turn around and continue sleeping. So yes, I don't really _need_ this, but my lazy self would love the comfort.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      In all fairness, I'm sure there was a day when many people said: "A remote for the TV--how lazy can you be?" (Admittedly there were only about four channels or so then.) >If I could just press a button The more likely model is to go "Alexa--turn off the downstairs lights." Joking aside, there's probably some confluence between consumer IoT devices and natural language recognition that brings some things into the lazy but genuinely useful range. Unfortunately, most of my annoying home tasks fall into messy physical world interfaces (do the laundry and put it away) that don't really lend themselves to digital automation.
gwright 10y ago
I don't have anything useful to say about IoT, but I can think of three major changes newer than television: microwave ovens, personal computers, Internet. Mobile phones are also a major change that you might also put in this category.
jkestner 10y ago
Like AI, IoT is a catch-all term for the things that are not yet significant enough to have their own more specific category. Useful applications arise from the primordial soup and acquire their own name.

by dexwiz 10y ago

jkot 10y ago

IoT will eventually happen, but for Smart Grid to reduce power usage. There is a potential to save 30% of energy cost.

Animats 10y ago
That doesn't need the "cloud". It just needs a broadcast signal telling your appliances the current price of electricity.
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  It's not exactly the same, but in the UK, Economy 7 is effectively a low tech version of this. At night the price of electricity is cheaper, so electric storage heaters and boilers are switched on then to take advantage of the lower costs and reduce demand at peak times. Rather than using timers, it is controlled by a radio signal broadcast throughout the country. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
savrajsingh 10y ago
Check out Wattvision - it's like Fitbit for your house ;)

joezydeco 10y ago

IoT is a fad in the current way we're going about it. What's not a fad is getting devices to communicate their health and status to an upstream repository for things like predictive analytics. This is already happening in the B2B sector. It will reach the consumer sector next, but like you said it will take 2-3 consumer product cycles to make it real. It won't be about remote control or any of the barely useful use-cases you're seeing with fridges and door locks and water bottles. It will be knowing your home's A/C has two weeks of operation before it seizes up. It will be knowing your home's plumbing has frozen and burst while you were away.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dimino 10y ago
The "TV in the refrigerator" IoT is definitely a fad, but you're right, there's a fundamental need to connect devices together and to a central managing/monitoring service.
- discreteevent 10y ago
  There is also a fundamental need to have those devices be secure. Consumers take this for granted because they have been secure for so long. They don't know what's coming. And when they find out then there whole thing will probably blow up. It just takes a few companies to tarnish it for everybody else. The problem with IoT is the I
  - acdha 10y ago
    The problem is the lack of corporate liability. If they used some alternative to the internet we'd be reading about how it makes the SWIFT network look secure add long as the alternatives are “spend money and time doing it responsibly” or “ship it now with a strong EULA”.
- freehunter 10y ago
  That stuff kills me when it's marketed like that. It's not IoT! Having a tablet or a TV or Twitter in your computer isn't IoT, it's just a shitty tablet, and it still required human intervention. That's literally the Internet we have right now. IoT would be your fridge talking to the store and telling them you need more milk, and then you get a shipment of milk. But that's infinitely harder than taping a tablet to a fridge, so Samsung sells us a tablet taped to a fridge and it's called IoT. Connected devices are not IoT. Marketing needs to learn that.

kilroy123 10y ago

I agree about everything being connected to the internet. However, I think no truly groundbreaking device has come out, yet. I bet money that one day, a truly useful device will eventually come out. Something, years later, we'll wonder how we ever lived without it. Like the iPhone did for smartphones.

andrewstuart2 10y ago

There are a few devices where there are good arguments for connectivity. An HVAC thermostat, for one, benefits as it's the most expensive consumer of electricity, so a smarter device (or access to external resources) makes sense. Additionally, the ability to control it remotely has a great benefit for "oh hey, I forgot to turn off the A/C before we left on our month-long trip." It could pay for itself right there. I really think IoT ought to be much more focused on a few high-value devices. Mostly, I think this is important because they have high value for end users but, as such, are also potentially targets for attacks, and by focusing on fewer devices they can hopefully be made much more secure.

jonlucc 10y ago

All valid points, but I think the products now are laying groundwork for the future. I really believe that at some point, the home will have more safety features and convenience because of IoT. I'm actually surprised that Nest failed to deliver more products. There will be some company that offers a wide range of products and has a huge marketing budget for explaining the use to people.

legulere 10y ago

The article isn't really good but the headline is spot on: "Smart technology is a solution looking for a problem" http://www.dezeen.com/2016/04/27/smart-technology-driverless-cars-interview-maarten-hajer-rotterdam-biennale-2016-curator-netherlands/ http://www.dezeen.com/2016/04/27/smart-technology-driverless...

maxerickson 10y ago

Alternatively, it's a feature not a product. My favorite example is garage doors. People won't pay $50 to retrofit a half assed automation onto their existing opener. When many openers come with wifi without much of a price premium, lots of people will start using the feature.

hodgesrm 10y ago
Just out of curiosity why would you want to open a garage door via the internet? If it somehow enables you to close the door without seeing what it might be closing on that sounds like a spectacularly bad idea.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Obstruction sensors and automatic reverse have been required for decades (in other words, the openers are already meant to be safe to operate without observation). Anyway, just knowing it is open can be useful.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I can imagine use cases. The most obvious is: "Siri/Alexa open the garage door." (assuming some established authentication mechanism) rather than dealing with the unique garage door remote. I can imagine others. "This is Alexa, it's 11pm and your garage door is still open. Should I close it?" and things in that vein. But those seem pretty marginal. I have very rarely left my garage door open by accident.

cgriswald 10y ago

I'm not sure it's a fad, but it is definitely not ready for prime time. I have a "smart washer" largely because the smarts came with the washer I wanted. The "smart" functionality is completely unusable. First, it can only be connected to the network via WPS. (And the reviewers for the smart phone app don't seem to be able to connect it even with WPS. I haven't tried.) Second, the actual functionality of the connected app is a joke. So why do they have smart functionality at all? My guess is marketing. Is anyone going to return their otherwise awesome washer because the smart functionality is crap? Probably not, since there is no washer or dryer with true smart functionality on the market. But having it on there as a feature might sell a couple units. On the other hand, while a refrigerator that detects when I'm out of milk is useless now, I can imagine a future in which it then orders the milk for me, so I never have to worry about it. I honestly can't stand doing inventory and ordering/shopping every week. I would love for that process to be automated.

roywiggins 10y ago
I think you've reinvented the milkman. Regular milk deliveries might be a little bit more inconvenient than automatically ordered milk, but it's vastly simpler.
- nickonline 10y ago
  You're being ridiculously literal. What if you have milk but are out of orange juice or cheese or steak? Unless the 'milkman' is turning up with all these things on the of chance you're low on one this system is much more efficient.
tajen 10y ago
> detects when I'm out of milk That's a fad. I wouldn't be suprised if people just wanted to take a look inside their fridge while they're shopping, so a webcam at each level would be enough.
daveguy 10y ago
> I honestly can't stand doing inventory and ordering/shopping every week. I would love for that process to be automated. A beautiful fact about refrigerators is that they make for perfect whiteboard surfaces and they are magnetic. I take a picture of my fridge before I go shopping, on which I have written everything that needs to be purchased. A magnetic whiteboard marker with builtin eraser stays on the fridge. There is no way a "smart fridge" is going to catch up to that level of ease + utility any time soon.

jostmey 10y ago

You said it! I don't want a smart oven and a smart lamp. I just want stuff "that works". Digital devices take off when they have a killer application. So far I've seen nothing along these lines.

knn 10y ago
I will avoid buying 'smart' appliances for probably forever. Besides having mostly useless features, I'd rather not have another electronic probe in my life relaying all of the details of my life to everyone.

ctdonath 10y ago

The existing products (locks, sensors, smoke detectors) are barely different from existing home security products that have been on the market for years The existing products have miniscule market penetration, for decades, precisely because their networked integration is abysmal. IoT is yet another attempt to impose some order on the market, which is still focused on incompatibility as a way to retain customers rather than grow the market. There is ENORMOUS pent up demand for networked everything, if only a cheap universal standard arose and was accepted.

dexwiz 10y ago
I think that demand is from the companies and not the consumers. Stand in front of a Lowes in the Midwest and ask consumers who walk out if they would like whatever item they bought to be hooked up to the internet. I bet you would get more No's than Yes's.

steven2012 10y ago

Some IoT is a fad. But there are very useful things that you can do if you have many connected data devices and sensors at home. I have ~15 temperature sensors and door sensors that alert me when doors get opened. I was able to use that data to definitively measure the positive impact insulating my house had. I can tell when people enter or exit my house, and I also have ~10 cameras for security. If I get a notification that someone is around my house while I'm gone, I can call my local police department a lot faster than any alarm company. My Nest also tells me how long my furnace is on every day. Of course their data is useless so I constantly request and store this data in violation of their terms of services, because fuck Nest and their useless TOS. But with that I can make smarter decisions on how to save money in heating and I've halved my bill by manually adjusting my heating (not relying on their stupid algos). Do I need a fridge that tells me I'm out of eggs? No. But having metrics and data lets me as a homeowner make smarter decisions that save money.

brianwawok 10y ago
So you got a smart thermostat, wrote some code to hit an API, and do some fancy math to half your heating bill. Why could you not just turn your thermostat down 4 degrees for the same thing? I get that there might be some marginal gains you can get with tech ("A heat wave is coming tomorrow, let's shut off the furnace 1 hour early"), but it seems really small and crude compared to existing offline tech can do (look for leaky holes in your insulation, add 6" more blown insulation in your attic, etc"). Or for example replacing a 80% efficient with a 99% efficient furnace has a pretty huge impact. Does nest magic timing have more?
- steven2012 10y ago
  The nest cost $250, insulation cost 10x that, and new furnace is 40x. I agree that insulation and upgrading the home would produce the nest results but my point is that the data is useful, not useless. I could shut my heating completely and save 100% but that misses the point. What I did was turn on the heating in the morning to a temperature that was comfortable and then shut it off so that by the time everyone left for work/school the temperature would still be acceptable but on the lower bounds. That saved about 45 mins of heating a day. Overnight as well I could see how my furnace behaved and tweaked based on that, etc. The key isn't just the nest but the other temp sensors so I have a complete idea of what my houses characteristics are.

yoodenvranx 10y ago

> IoT is a fad It is a fad because there is no common standard. Just imagine you could connect to all your devices (washing machine, heating system, warm water system, garage doors, TV and hifi) from the same app om your phone. And just imagine you could just go to your parents place and do they same thing there. Just imagine you could just buy some random LED bulbs from alibaba and they would just work in your home without thinking about the right standards. But all of this is just not possible because there is no common standard. I'd really like to buy some remote controllable LED bulbs and perhaps a remote for my heating system. But there are dozens of companies which offer the samw things but they don't work with each other... This is why home automation is not taking off. My parents are planning to build a new house and it will be 100% traditional without any fancy home automation stuff because there is no universal system.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
> Just imagine you could connect to all your devices (washing machine, heating system, warm water system, garage doors, TV and hifi) from the same app om your phone Why would I want to.
- yoodenvranx 10y ago
  Well, to be honest: Nobody really needs this. But if this would work flawlessly then life could be just a bit more comfortable. For example I am laying currently on the bed and the light in the kitchen is still on. Yes, I could just get out of bed and walk over there, but if there would be an easy gui for this is my mobile it would be good because at the moment I am very lazy. A quite real problem I have in winter is the temperature in my sleeping room. Sometimes I wake up and it is either too warm or too cold and I have to get up and change the settings. Usually I then have the problem that I can not fall asleep again. If I could just press a button, I could turn around and continue sleeping. So yes, I don't really _need_ this, but my lazy self would love the comfort.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    In all fairness, I'm sure there was a day when many people said: "A remote for the TV--how lazy can you be?" (Admittedly there were only about four channels or so then.) >If I could just press a button The more likely model is to go "Alexa--turn off the downstairs lights." Joking aside, there's probably some confluence between consumer IoT devices and natural language recognition that brings some things into the lazy but genuinely useful range. Unfortunately, most of my annoying home tasks fall into messy physical world interfaces (do the laundry and put it away) that don't really lend themselves to digital automation.

gwright 10y ago

I don't have anything useful to say about IoT, but I can think of three major changes newer than television: microwave ovens, personal computers, Internet. Mobile phones are also a major change that you might also put in this category.

jkestner 10y ago

Like AI, IoT is a catch-all term for the things that are not yet significant enough to have their own more specific category. Useful applications arise from the primordial soup and acquire their own name.