Smart TVs, smart fridges, smart washing machines? Disaster waiting to happen | Ars Technica.
A friend of mine at work pointed out the above article to me and asked about my thoughts. Got me ruminating, so decided to blog my mind-stream.
I completely get the security and privacy worries expressed in the article. As my mentioned in my
previous blog post, I am not sure how this is going to pan out. I imagine a lot of bad things are going to happen to good people before the security holes of the IoT are sorted out and addressed. This is not that different from how security will always be a concern even with the conventional internet in terms of spyware, viruses and unwarranted data gathering. I imagine that we will settle at some cost benefit trade-off. The general trend may be that people may care less and less about privacy over years. I don’t know…!The other aspect is “economic efficiency” … the author seems concerned that we will tend to throw away perfectly good TVs and fridges simply because the IoT smarts in them will not be kept up to date by manufacturers …perhaps intentionally so, to maximize sales. This may be true to some extent but i think he misses the bigger point. The “worth” of a consumer device of the future will be more in the IoT smarts than the hardware. Without the smarts, the device is is like an artifact from the stone age.
Take the example of my camera. I have a great stand alone digital camera with great optics .. but i rarely use it. I took it with me on my vacation recently, and even carried it around a few times, but I used it for less that 1% times. I used my smartphone camera mostly. This was not simply because the phone was handy while the camera is an extra thing to carry etc. The main reason, i found, was that the camera does not have instant connectivity. I need to connect it to a PC via USB to download my photos and then send them to my family. This is a pain in the neck. But with my Windows Phone things are completely automatic. I take a photo, it is instantly uploaded to my sky drive, and i have shared that folder with my family, so they instantly see it updated … on their phones … all without an intervention on my part. I just click a photo and they see it within a minute. So when i want to snap a picture I invariably choose the smartphone even though its optics is relatively mediocre.
The instant dissemination of data trumps every other argument for me. I do want to use my super duper stand alone camera, but it needs to be IoT enabled! How will the camera manufacturer “update” by old camera to enable this? It is practically impossible. So like it or not, I will chuck it (or rather sell it to some Luddite) and buy a new one… then chuck that and buy a new one again … not because the camera optics are improving but because the IoT smarts of the camera will keep on evolving (the CPU, the wireless stack, the on board compression and digital processing etc), and without those smarts the camera is not worth that much to me.
So that is the bottom line … once people decide that the worth of everyday objects comes from their IoT smarts rather that their non-IT hardware, it becomes an almost unstoppable Juggernaut .. no body can fight it. All companies will fall in line. Security, privacy, efficiency all become secondary variables … they will get fixed one way or another .. and sometimes after painful stumbles. But the IoT bandwagon will march on!
Anand's musings 