THE THING IS...

Your 30-second guide to everything

What: Essentially, the Internet of Things, but one further. So it’s not just a fridge that texts your phone to remind you to buy milk. This is another level, where the stuff around you will check on your health and well-being, and self-adjust to suit you better.

Why: Because they can, and because some of it will be useful — imagine an interlinking web of stuff designed to protect and serve, anticipating your every need and whim.

Why Now: Because the future is here. We already have toilets that measure one’s health by checking urine; beds that automatically adjust to

Smart Stuff

improve sleep; clothes that store sunlight to heat the wearer... Soon, everything we own will be talking to other things we own, measuring us, assessing us, reminding us, and recalibrating themselves to better serve us.

How: That is for the techies to work out. We just need to know what, and decide which bits of it we want. Is it the toaster that you can adjust by phone from the sofa? Or a toilet that tells your kitchen that you are low in iron and should be eating more leafy greens? It will be easy to be distracted by the merely convenient, the trick is to focus on the actually useful.

Who: Oprah and talk-show host and entrepreneur Kris Aquino, who are early-adopter converts. Techies, obviously. Anyone who finds pushing buttons a chore. Those who don’t worry about all the things that currently ‘serve’ us banding together and deciding it’s time we served them. Those who don’t mind that every thing we do, eat and excrete will soon become ‘data’; stored somewhere, accessible to someone. Those who don’t worry about hackers.