In Ray Bradbury’s story The Veldt, the Hadley family lives in an automated house – the Happylife Home – featuring advanced machines taking care of and anticipating their needs. The children are minded by the virtual reality nursery that materialises in their imagination, usually in the form of an African veldt. While the parents gradually become uneasy with this automated lifestyle, the children become dependent on it. When the parents decide to turn off the house to reclaim their autonomy and self-sufficiency, the kids trap them inside the nursery where they are eaten by the virtual veldt’s virtual lions.
Although Bradbury’s Happylife Home was a futuristic fantasy when The Veldt was published in 1950, it is closer to reality today with the emergence of the internet of things. According to technology analyst Bill Wasik, writing in Wired, “A decade after Wi-Fi put all our computers on a wireless network – and half a decade after the smartphone revolution put a series of pocket-size devices on that network – we are seeing the dawn of an era when the most mundane items in our lives can talk wirelessly among themselves, performing tasks on command, giving us data we’ve never had before.”
Similar to the Happylife Home’s ubiquitous automated machines and their blurring of the real and virtual, the internet of things is increasingly incorporated into everything we can imagine, from kitchen appliances, clothing, medical records, actual medicines and coffee makers to light bulbs, furniture, floors, cars, road signage and entire buildings, thereby merging physical and digital boundaries.
Like the Happylife Home relies on its smart machines, the internet of things helps ensure pervasive and ubiquitous connectivity to the internet in everything around us. The internet of things may not yet materialise African veldts, but there are eerily similar dependencies on it for daily routines, work schedules, entertainment and other personal, professional and social needs and interactions.
As social economist Jeremy Rifkin says, the internet of things: “Will connect everything with everyone in an integrated global network. People, machines, natural resources, production lines, logistics networks, consumption habits, recycling flows, and virtually every other aspect of economic and social life will be linked via sensors and software to the internet of things platform, continually feeding (information) to every node – businesses, homes, vehicles – moment to moment, in real time.” Indeed, this phenomenon is unleashing information and communication capabilities once locked in our computers and digital devices into the material world of physical things.
A system that knows your daily routine and can predict your behaviour is a system that knows who you are, where you are, what you do
The internet of things involves different kinds of advanced mobile and information communication technologies, sensors and radio-frequency identification microchips embedded into physical objects, connected together and to the internet. Thus, they are enabled to communicate with each other, coordinate activities, enact commands, perform tasks, predict outcomes, and generate and share data, ostensibly functioning as one integrated system without any involvement or intervention from humans.
Houses, for instance, are offering some of Bradbury’s Happylife Home features, without the virtual killer lions. There are refrigerators that communicate with supermarkets to order food, weight scales to monitor diets, power utilities to lower electricity consumption, and manufacturers when maintenance is required. There are coffee makers synced to alarm clocks, turning on when you wake up, and dishwashers which turn off when a cup is placed inside. There are smart blankets embedded with neurosensors that monitor how you feel: the fibre optics woven into the material turning red indicates anxiety, blue indicates calmness. There are thermostats that study calendars, weather reports and furniture to regulate heating and cooling based on the season, temperature, and location of the house’s occupants.
Smart cities are connecting urban infrastructure, including streetlamps, fire hydrants, buses, roads, and crosswalks to the internet to generate new data about municipal services that, in turn, can be analysed to help improve public management, maintenance, operations, and traffic.
Smart grids are networking everything that generates, controls and consumes electricity, from industrial power plants and factories to homes, to better monitor and reduce consumption, manage and distribute loads during peak demands, and determine dynamic pricing for energy efficiency.
Technology is being embedded in everything from jackets to shoes: wearable technology can keep track of your physical activity, heart rate, respiration, sleeping patterns, and other vital signs to help monitor health, diet, or exercise and to inform Facebook friends, insurance companies, and employers.
Even healthcare is becoming part of the internet of things, with electronic medical records communicating with one another, pill bottles alerting patients when to take medication, pharmacists when to refill them or physicians when a dose is missed, and consumable pills embedded with microscopic computer chips, activated by stomach acids, that report compliance with medical orders directly to electronic medical records.
But like Bradbury’s Happylife Home, there are perils lurking in the internet of things. First, it will be vulnerable to duplicitous activities including hacking, manipulation, sabotage, and surveillance, providing governments, corporations, cybercriminals and others with unlimited avenues into our digital and physical lives. For instance, last year cybercriminals hacked into more than 100,000 internet-enabled appliances, including refrigerators and utility meters. This enabled the cybercriminals to bombard the owners with thousands of spam e-mails and collect data about their home activities. Some security researchers have also experimented on how to hack into smart cars to wreak havoc on steering, brakes, acceleration, locks, and lights.
Second, our privacy will be jeopardised by this pervasive and ubiquitous connectivity as objects track, analyse and share our personal data. Although we may be comfortable (over)sharing in the virtual world, we may not be as willing to do so regarding our real lives. But a system that knows your daily routine and can predict your behaviour is a system that knows who you are, where you are, what you do, what you’ve been doing, and with whom you’ve been doing it.
Third, the internet of things will help enable greater and more granular surveillance of our lives. Connected objects provide new ways to spy on, study and exploit us by a multitude of entities for diverse purposes. The internet of things also generates a continuous stream of personal data that is mainly out of the control of individuals but not of those entities that can pay for or commandeer it.
Fourth, the internet of things will increase opportunities for cyber attacks against entire industries, economies and countries. An adversary could digitally attack a smart grid, knocking out electricity for long periods and interrupting food, fuel and water supplies in addition to entire communication networks, financial markets, air traffic control, manufacturing operations, and other disruptions on massive scales.
Fifth, the internet of things will complicate energy challenges as each connected object will require power sources either through batteries or electricity. Batteries eventually need to be replaced, meaning countless batteries in a single home let alone a corporate or industrial setting. Energy consumption, demand and prices will rise to ever-higher levels as more things become connected. A proposed solution to this problem is the eventual commercial use of wireless power using resonant magnetic coupling technologies that beam power to devices from special charging stations.
Regardless of its promises and perils, the internet of things requires a significant shift in how we conceptualise information and use the internet. It demands a redefinition of our relationship to both machines and everyday objects. And it signals a major change in how we will live, work, organise, and interact in such a connected world. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are already beginning to expect the internet of things in our lives. In the near future, we will also have to become used to being one of the many things connected to and through the internet of things. Indeed, if someone ever tries to turn off our internet of things, we may feed them to the lions.
Marc Kosciejew is a lecturer at the University of Malta’s Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences.