by Liron Shapira
December 1, 2013
December 1, 2013
from
Gigaom Website
Liron Shapira is
the co-founder and CTO of
Quixey and is an
advisor to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI).
In the future everyone will be connected - everywhere, all the
time - making space and time no longer an issue for physical devices,
people and products.
Which modern technology, “enables us to send
communications…with the quickness of thought, and to annihilate
time as well as space”?
If you answered “the internet,” you’re
right. If you answered “the telephone,” “the television” or any
other speed-of-light telecommunication technology, you’re also
right.
That quote is from an 1860 book by
George Bartlett Prescott, an American telegraph official.
In 1860, the fastest telecommunication
link between California and New York was the Pony Express, which
took at least 10 days to get a message to the other side of the
continent. Then one day in 1861, the First Transcontinental
Telegraph was completed and you could send the same message across
the continent in 10 seconds.
Two days later, the Pony Express
officially ceased operations. Prescott was onto something.
The Ancient Greek word “tele” means “far
away”. To telecommunicate is to communicate farther than you can
shout.
When you connect two points with a
speed-of-light telecommunication channel, you annihilate the
spacetime-distance between the points. You get a kind of wormhole.
The internet is a network of
spacetime wormholes connecting every human being on the planet. If
you want to chat with someone face to face, you just stare into your
cell phone and they stare into theirs. You can’t tell if they’re a
thousand miles away, or in the next room.
But when it comes to physical things,
we’re still living under the tyranny of spacetime.
Kevin Ashton, the inventor of the
term “Internet
of Things”, wrote in 1999:
“We’re physical, and so is our environment… You can’t eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more.”
Just look around the room right now, at
anything other than your cell phone.
All the things you can see and touch
depend on where you are in space, or on how much time you spend
moving yourself to a new location.
That’s a problem, because at any given
moment, most of the things you care about aren’t in your line of
sight. Almost none of the food you’re going to eat that day is.
Almost none of the appliances you’re going to use that night are.
That’s the tyranny of spacetime, which
the internet of things is now beginning to overthrow.
The internet of things has three major
spacetime-annihilating functions:
Transportation
In the past, far away things had no way
to know what you wanted from them or when you wanted it.
The right things wouldn’t know how to
find you. So you’d have to travel to where the things were -
to a restaurant, to your house, to various stores.
If you shop on Amazon instead of going
to the store, you’re on the internet of things.
Last year, Amazon acquired robotic
warehouse technology company
Kiva systems. When you one-click on
that toothbrush, Amazon’s robots move it from deep inside the
warehouse onto the floor where employees pack it and ship it to you.
The internet of things transports things
to you pretty fast, but not at the speed of light. It uses the
internet’s fast-moving bits the way skydivers use a little pilot
chute to pull out a bigger, heavier parachute.
Teleportation
Actually, sometimes the internet of
things does make faraway things come you at the speed of light. The
trick, called “teleportation”,
is to convert things to bits and then back to things again.
The first teleporters were invented
before the internet, but the far away “facsimiles” they brought you
were just pieces of paper. Modern teleporters are a lot more
versatile.
The
MakerBot Digitizer can scan 3D
objects and store their structure as a file of bits. The
MakerBot Replicator can read a file
of bits and print a 3D object. Put the Digitizer and Replicator at
opposite ends of an internet connection and you get a teleporter.
Thousands of objects can already be
teleported at the speed of light - silverware, vases, lamp frames,
and even some weird-looking, but functional shoes.
Soon the internet will be able to
teleport physical objects into your lap as easily as it teleports
web pages into your screen, and you’ll be able to surf the internet
of things.
Telepresence
Sometimes you want to interact with far
away things without having them transport or teleport to you. Then
what you want is telepresence.
For example, you often move far away
from your locked bike. Normally that means you can’t unlock your
bike to let a friend borrow it, and you also don’t know when thieves
are cutting your lock.
LOCK8 is a smart bike lock that lets you unlock it from
far away, and notifies you when a potential thief is tampering with
it. No matter how far away you are from your bike lock, LOCK8 gives
you all the benefits of being near your bike lock.
What if you’re far away from your
office, but still want to attend meetings as if you weren’t? Virtual
presence systems like
Anybots and
Suitable Technologies’
Beam let you remote control a
walking, talking, seeing, hearing robot.
You can travel halfway around the world,
and still have a physical presence at your office.
The future - The internet of everything
Did you know you have two wireless
modems in your head?
Your eyes constantly receive radio
signals in the visible spectrum, and your sense of vision connects
your brain to nearby physical things, like a de facto Local Area
Network. But your sensory LAN connection only extends as far as your
line of sight. It’s nothing compared to a Wi-Fi internet connection.
In the future of the internet of things,
Wi-Fi is going to be everywhere, and the internet will connect you
to every person and thing on the planet via transportation,
teleportation and telepresence.
A trillion wormholes will let you reach
out from anywhere on earth and hug your loved ones, or try on a new
pair of shoes, or unlock your bike.
In the future beyond the internet of
things, all your senses will be wired directly into the internet’s
wormholes, and you’ll be completely indifferent to the location of
your physical body.
When you look around you, you won’t be
looking into a nearby region of space.
You’ll be surfing an internet that
annihilates all time and space - the internet of everything.
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