Hype vs. Reality: A Reality Check on the Internet of Things

Michael Fitzgerald Reading Time: 2 min 

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Internet of Things Hype Reality Check

The Internet of Things has plenty of hype — it’s going to be big, really big — but also plenty of detractors. The naysayers breathily predict everything from the surveillance state to a wrecked economy to people enslaved by machines. Here are nine bits of information to consider:

Hype: It’s hard to miss the hype for the Internet of Things. A big report by the investment advisory firm Raymond James predicts that in 2020 250 new things a second will connect to the Internet. That’s up from 80 a second right now. But what that means for the market is not yet clear.

Anti-hype: Pundit Jeremy Rifkin says the market impact should be clear: nothing good. He argues in this video that the Internet of Things will kill capitalism.

Jeremy Rifkin’s book says the Internet of Things will create (yet another) battle for control of the Internet. The book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) says the IoT can open up the world to collaboration not seen before in capitalist society, or to aggregation of corporate power of the worst sort since the Trust era. Rifkin calls it “the critical economic battle of the 21st century.” You can read an excerpt here.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a toaster. This graphic illustrates the current expectations for the Internet of Things.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) thinks that on the Internet, the government and big companies will in fact know you’re posing as a toaster. Think what you want about the ACLU, but this blog post includes a collection of links to ways companies and government already use things like televisions and street cameras to build what one person called “databases of ruin.”

How will Internet-enabled basketballs change the future? This video shows the economist Michael Mandel outline how the Internet of Things makes the Internet into a truly broad-based technology revolution.

But what if those iBasketballs rebel against us, refusing to go in the hoop? Is the Internet of Things the beginnings of Skynet (the villain in the Terminator movies), enabling the revenge of the machines?

The security of the Internet of Things is under fire before it even exists.

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Comments (2)
Heraclio Munoz
Network Infrastructures around the world are going through a massive transformation to keep up with the anticipated proliferation of Internet of Things and to enable 5G wireless network based services in future not so far. Groundbreaking technologies and solutions evolving in the SDN, NFV and Edge Computing space are laying a foundation for agile and cost effective network infrastructure, designed to provide highly optimized and distributed compute and storage resources for proper implementation of IoT technologies. 4 Edge Computing Technologies Enabling IoT-Ready Network Infrastructure: https://www.lanner-america.com/blog/4-edge-computing-technologies-enabling-iot-ready-network-infrastructure/
Todd Roth
IoT will improve peoples lives with sensors imbedded in consumable items and will be capable of providing actionable intelligence / diagnostics of every industrial machine such as trains, planes and automobiles.  Use athletics as an example - where sensors will provide real time data to help coaches determine the health and performance of their players.  It will also likely define innovative companies vs. laggards - for M2M sensors reduce the friction on reordering everyday items or simply remind us via our smartphones when to take medicine.  Sensors and the big data that is derived from them - will be the next IT goldmine.