How the internet of things will change your life
Driving cars, running factories, switching on street lights, even searching for life on other planets – the so-called IOT is about to take over the world. Alex Hannaford spoke to the British tech guru behind the next big innovation
When it comes to predicting the future, Kevin Ashton is not a fan of what he calls “vague hand-waving”. He prefers laying all his cards on the table, even at the risk of being completely wrong. Here’s one: 25 years from now, he believes, you’ll be able to live in Edinburgh and commute – in your self-driving car – to London each day via a trunk road designed especially for the purpose, at speeds in excess of 250mph. (Formula 1 racers, he points out, can already drive at 220mph, and the processing speed of a human brain is a lot slower than that of the average microchip.)
For half the journey, you’ll catch up on sleep, or read a book. There will be no accidents. Along the way, you’ll zoom past cars on another road that runs parallel to yours. There, you might see an old Ford Escort, backfiring – driven by one of the holdouts who refuse to embrace modern technology. Once you reach the city, traffic lights and street signs will be connected to the internet and they’ll talk to each other, responding to changes in traffic.
Your car will drop you at work, after which it’ll disappear five miles down the road to a parking spot that’s just become available. At 5pm, it’ll pick you up and whisk you back to Edinburgh. It might sound crazy, Ashton acknowledges, but no more so than if you told someone living in Reading in 1850 that one day people there would be commuting daily to London. In fact, if anyone’s going to have a successful stab at guessing what we’ll be doing in the future, Ashton’s about as good a person as you’ll find. Even if you haven’t heard his name, you’ll probably have heard of the term he coined to describe how this future will be possible: the internet of things (IOT).
The idea behind the IOT is essentially this: it’s not just computers that can be hooked up to the internet, but physical devices, vehicles, streetlights, buildings etc. – all of which are embedded with sensors and connected to a network. You might have a Nest thermostat in your home – connected via Wi-fi and controlled by an app on your phone. It learns when you’re home and adjusts the temperature accordingly, and you can operate it from anywhere. This is one of the “things” in the internet of things. But the IOT is also revolutionising manufacturing and medical devices, reimagining cities, and helping us discover worlds beyond our solar system.
Like me, Ashton is a British expat living in Austin, Texas, and I
first ran into him a few years ago at a coffee van we both used to visit. As with many people now in their 40s and early 50s (Ashton was born in 1968), his childhood in London was spent tinkering with a Sinclair ZX81 personal computer. He studied Scandinavian literature at the University of London, edited the student newspaper, and became friendly with employees from one of its biggest advertisers, Procter & Gamble, who would later give him a job. At P&G, Ashton was working as part of a team launching a new range of cosmetics, but he wanted to know why a popular shade of lipstick seemed always to be out of stock in local stores.
The problem, he realised, was that staff didn’t have time to monitor the shelves continuously and input information about stock levels – which, in the 1990s, was how most data was fed to computers. “The missing lipstick was one of the world’s smallest problems, but it was a symptom of one of the world’s biggest problems: computers were brains without senses,” Ashton would later write. Computers were great at processing humanentered data, but they couldn’t sense things for themselves. In fact, he pointed out, a computer could beat the chess world champion, but it couldn’t see if a lipstick was on the shelf. So he put a type of microchip known as an RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag into a lipstick, and an antenna on the shelf, so when the lipstick was removed the antenna would relay that information to a computer, then – via the internet – to the department responsible for restocking. This was the beginning of the internet of things.
In 1999, with a grant from P&G, Ashton moved to America to begin a research project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), expanding on his work with RFID technology. What he discovered, he says, “is that I’d been lied to all my life: great innovation didn’t come from geniuses having moments of inspiration. It was about putting in the work; finding a way through and messing up and figuring out why you messed up, and then trying something different. And this incremental, step-by-step approach to innovation was just how everybody else was doing it around me, too.”
We meet up to talk IOT at an Austin café one afternoon in April. One thing that annoys him is when journalists describe the
“You’ll be able to commute from Edinburgh to London every morning in your self-driving car, at speeds in excess of 250mph”
internet of things solely in terms of household appliances. “It’s always about the f***ing kitchen,” he says, laughing. “But it’s not about your toaster or your fridge talking to your app.” Ashton says the easiest analogy for the IOT is the human nervous system. “We understand that we have a number of sensors: in addition to the five senses we were taught in kindergarten, we can sense temperature; whether we feel sick; whether we’re standing up or sitting down. We get multiple sources of information about the same thing flowing to one place where we can correlate and compare, and that gives us a comprehensive picture of the world around us.”
If you apply this to the world of technology, Ashton explains, sensors gather information but really only become effective when they form part of a network. “Look at Uber,” he says. “You have two pieces of sensory information: a GPS sensor in the phone of somebody who wants a ride, and a GPS sensor in the phone of somebody who wants to give somebody a ride. Both of those pieces of data go to the internet and are analysed by an algorithm in a computer, which then finds the closest person wanting to give somebody a ride to the person who wants a ride. That’s a sensory network.” But, Ashton explains, it’s not a network of things; it’s the internet of things. A network could simply be two or more computers connected. The internet connects every computer or device – and that’s what makes the IOT possible.
It’s the internet that enables Google Maps to let you know you’re about to encounter eight minutes of traffic on the M25; and that will facilitate a traffic light staying green for longer when there’s no need for it to turn red, in order to ease traffic flow in the city of the future. And it’s the internet that makes that connection between two people, who don’t know each other but who want to meet for ride-hailing purposes, possible. “One of the fascinating characteristics of the internet is its openness,” Ashton says. “Think about GPS. It was developed for navigation purposes but it was intended to be a closed system: the idea of me sharing my navigation information with you, and you with me, was not anticipated when GPS was invented. But because of that openness, someone came up with an idea that has been profoundly disruptive to a centuries-old industry – hailing a taxi.”
Ashton offers another example: a friend of his who works at the University of Washington developed an app that lets you measure your lung function simply by blowing into the mouthpiece of your iphone during a call. “But then they realised it didn’t have to be a smartphone. Most people in developing countries have mobile phones but not smartphones, and these guys at the University of Washington figured out you could blow into the microphone on those things too.” Now, Ashton says, there’s a freephone number you can call, you blow into the phone and the reading is analysed by a computer. The point of the story, he says, is that you can check for lung disease using the single most ubiquitous network sensor in the world.
Ashton’s right that, for the moment at least, most of the really profound implications for the internet of things aren’t in the home – even if that’s where the most readily accessible examples can be found. According to Maciej Kranz, in his book Building the Internet of Things, worldwide manufacturing is undergoing some sort of renaissance, and, he says, the “IOT is part of the reason… each zone, from the enterprise to the plant floor to the loading dock, receives real-time alerts about changes through networked mobile devices, video monitors and human-machine interfaces. The real-time information links back to the entiresupply chain.” Kranz reports that out of Ford Motor Company’s 40 vehicle-assembly plants, 25 now use IOT technology to speed up communications. Similar gains, he says, are being made in transportation, agriculture, education, healthcare, sports and entertainment.
Some of the things that the IOT is revolutionising are literally out of this world. If, as Ashton is convinced will happen, we find life on other planets in the next 50 years, he says we’ll have the internet of things to thank. By networking telescopes and connecting them to huge computing power, our ability to search the universe has increased by thousands of times. “And the more data that the analytical software has to crunch on, the better it gets,” Ashton says.
The internet of things does have its critics – and most of the criticisms come down to security, something Ashton readily acknowledges we need to tackle. According to Business Insider Intelligence, by 2020 there will be 34 billion connected devices in the world. Ashton says they have the same security risks as any network computer, but they should also be subject to the same checks – the key checks being, “Is this device only sharing data with those authorised to get it, and is this device only running authorised software?” Everything from thermostats to cars could be vulnerable to hackers – with potentially devastating consequences. “Your car becomes a network computer, and the vulnerability there is that if I can hack into [your navigation system], I can take over your car. This is not hypothetical.” In 2015, security researchers hacked into a Jeep and managed to take over control of its brakes and transmission. Chrysler was forced to recall 1.4 million vehicles.
The good news is that these problems are solvable. “In most cases, it’s software engineers not being given the opportunity – usually by non-technical managers – to build a secure system in the first place,” Ashton says. “But security experts know how to solve them. It’s like if you put a really bad lock on your front door, or don’t install a smoke alarm; it’s usually caused by someone being sloppy.”
Ashton is currently working on a book full of his predictions, with the working title The Beautiful Future. He is an irredeemable optimist. So, since he’s chosen to make America his home, I ask whether he worries a Trump presidency that’s seemingly antiscience could stifle innovation. “It won’t change anything,” he says. “Government can definitely have an effect – look at the Kennedy-era investment in the space programme, for example – but [innovation] tends to happen anyway.” Also, he adds, there’s an illusion that America is the tech leader of the world. “That was the case in the 1990s, but look at tech exports. The world leader now is China, and has been since the beginning of the internet of things. No. 2 is Germany. The US is No. 3, with South Korea and Singapore very close behind. Besides which,” he adds, “the World Wide Web was invented by a British guy – Sir Tim Berners-lee. And the internet of things was invented by a British guy – me.”
“You can now check for lung disease by blowing into your mobile phone – the single most ubiquitous network sensor in the world”