The Internet of Things to come

Finding information has never been so easy and fast. What’s next?

WHENEVER I want answers to anything, I go to my modern-day oracle called Google.

Of course, there are huge differences between this virtual oracle and the legendary Oracle of Delphi.

The ancient Greeks went to Delphi to consult the priestess Pythia for answers to their questions and she, in turn, would deliver her replies in the form of cryptic prophecies that needed interpretation.

And woe be upon the person who understood it wrongly, as in the case of the Lydian king Croesus, who asked Pythia whether he should wage war on the Persian empire.

The reply he got was that a great empire would be destroyed if he did so. Heartened by that, Croesus attacked Persia but it was he and his empire that were defeated, not the Persians.

Most of the time, Google is not so cryptic and is even savvy enough to know what you are seeking, even when you misspell words. It will helpfully ask, “Did you mean... ?”

And it doesn’t predict the future or prophesise. Not yet anyway, but it does let you know where to check out doomsday predictions, if that’s what you are curious about.

While my choice is Google, others might use Baidu, Yahoo, Bing or DuckDuckGo, which is my daughter Jill’s preferred search engine because it doesn’t track you. But all of us are after the same thing: getting answers to what we want to know very quickly and with very little effort.

And that’s the rub. We don’t have to work at the finding anymore. Just click on your preferred “oracle” a.k.a. search engine, type a few words and voila! You’re in.

Because of that, the ability to comb through books, magazines and periodicals for information is practically a lost skill.

In school, my most trusted learning aids were the encyclopedia, National Geographic magazine and the dictionary. I used to read dictionaries when I had nothing else to do.

That followed me to my workplace as a journalist, where I added the phone directory and the Yellow Pages to my arsenal as major sources of information and contacts.

There was no social media to connect me with people quickly and easily. So, if I wanted to contact someone, I had to look up the massive phone directory, where there could be many people with the same name. That meant calling number after number till I found the right person.

It was laborious, time-consuming and frustrating. But I learned to be dogged and patient, and to talk nicely to strangers.

The phone directory and the Yellow Pages are no longer printed and my millennial children have no idea what they even look like.

On the plus side, because information is so easily available, my kids are well-informed and knowledgeable young people.

On a recent drive to Genting with my son, I had the most amazing conversation with him.

We talked about all sorts of things and I marvelled at the wide range of interests he had. Nick is about to graduate as a food scientist and he could tell me why there is botulism in honey and why food labels like “no sugar added” are misleading.

Of course he studied all this, but he said most of his sources were from the Internet, not textbooks.

He reminded me that when he was in secondary school, his online tutors were the likes of John and Hank Green.

He could tell me about redshift that shows how the universe is expanding and offer a quick explanation of Higgs Boson, the so-called God Particle that has to do with gravity and mass.

And then we had a good discussion on Marvel versus DC and why Star Wars matters.

I used to be upset that I never saw my son with a book in hand. That no longer bothers me. I know now that he reads, but not in the way I expect him to.

So while the present method of seeking information has been simplified to going online, at least that still requires the seeker to type out the question or key words.

But that is also changing. Jill took part in a survey recently and one of the questions asked was: How will digital telecommunications change in the next three years?

Her answer was that we will go the way of voice, meaning we will increasingly tell our devices what we want instead of having the bother of typing it out.

From the Internet Age we are now into the Internet of Things (IoT), which is defined as “the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data”.

Enter devices like Alexa. This is an intelligent digital personal assistant developed by Amazon that responds to spoken commands. It can switch on your house light, play music on request, read books, tell jokes and provide the latest on weather, traffic conditions and news.

The inspiration behind Alexa is the voice-interactive computer system of Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise. It is also named after the famed Library of Alexandria, the fount of knowledge of the ancient world.

So, there you have it: our future is being shaped by innovation that takes its cues from real and reel events.

The Yellow Pages iconic slogan was “Let your fingers do the walking”. That has changed to “Let your fingers do the typing/swiping”. In the very near future, it will be “Let your finger do nothing” with the likes of Alexa and AI-powered robots.

Our ability to spell will probably get worse, but the silver lining might be that we will have to learn to think carefully about what to say, speak clearly and enunciate properly so that our devices can understand and respond correctly.

And by default, we may communicate better with fellow humans too!

We don’t have to work at the finding anymore. Just click on your preferred ‘oracle’ a.k.a. search engine, type a few words and voila! You’re in.