Tech industry’s next big thing arrives

The fourth wave of the internet is upon us and has the potential to change everyone and everything, writes John Schmid.

THE internet of tomorrow has arrived, and it’s about much more than the services we use to connect with one another. This new internet already has its own acronym, IoT, for ‘‘internet of things’’, and some consider it the next industrial revolution.

‘‘We’re past the inflection point, where there are now more things connected to the internet than people,’’ says Keith Nosbusch, the chief executive of manufacturing company Rockwell.

The IoT will be defined by the exponential growth of webenabled ‘‘things’’ that measure, monitor and control the physical world, talking with each other more than they talk with humans.

Among the many examples: thermostats, car keys, public toilets, lake levels, parking meters and parking spaces, refrigerators and televisions, subways and airports, automated teller machines, soil conditions for crops, and rubbish bins that can say when they’re full.

The implementation of what Cisco chief executive John Chambers calls the ‘‘fourth wave of the internet’’ is under way.

Since last August, for example, Starbucks has installed internet links on 500 specialty coffee brewing machines around the country, allowing its ‘‘coffee expertise team’’ in Seattle to track which roasts are most popular.

Japanese health authorities have installed web-enabled sensors in some toilets to monitor bio-genetic health issues, according to Cisco. And the company says sensors on some automated teller machines already can recognise gunshots or human distress signals; Cisco experts foresee a time when the ATM will be able to notify police and possibly link to traffic monitors that can shut down traffic in the vicinity, if needed.

‘‘We are at the very, very beginning of a super-interconnected world,’’ said Steve Steinhilber, a senior Cisco executive who works on smart ecosystems.

Cisco, the world’s biggest maker of internet equipment, estimates that sensors are now installed on fewer than 1 per cent of the non-human devices that have the potential to transmit data from an internet address. But that’s rapidly changing. By 2020, when the world population will hit 7.7 billion, Cisco expects 50 billion devices to be interconnected.

That will create a profusion of data unlike ever before. And those devices will be communicating at least as much with each other as with humans. ‘‘Increasingly, everything will be connected to everything,’’ said Rob Soderbery, a senior Cisco strategist.

‘‘It’s the marriage of minds and machines,’’ says Marco Annunziata, chief economist at General Electric. ‘‘This is a transformation as powerful as the industrial revolution,’’ he said in a presentation broadcast online as part of the TED Talk lecture series.

The IoT will take much of the guesswork out of running an organisation, futurists predict. Diagnostic capabilities will mean intelligent machines are fixed in advance: ‘‘There will be no more power outages, no more flight delays,’’ Annunziata predicted.

Some liken this vision of a networked future to the original Star Trek TV series, on which the crew of the Starship Enterprise used smartphone-sized ‘‘tricorders’’ to scan and analyse unfamiliar creatures and surroundings.

‘‘With the internet of things, your smartphone will become a tricorder,’’ says said John Barrett, head of the Smart Systems Integration Research Group. ‘‘Walk up to this piano. Who was playing it over recent years? What music was played on it?’’

That, of course, naturally leads to concerns about the ability of the IoT to be used for Big Brother-like intrusions on privacy.

‘‘Privacy as a concept under the internet of things may become meaningless,’’ Barrett said in a TED Talk. ‘‘Whatever way we think it will turn out, get used to it. Because it’s already happening.’’

According to Cisco’s Chambers, the first wave of the internet was email and basic websites. The second was e-commerce. The third, which is the current state, is defined by the cloud, social media and video. Version 4.0 is the now-developing internet of things.

Rockwell’s Nosbusch cited predictions that more people will exit poverty in the next decade than have in the entirety of human history, with more than 70 million people on the planet crossing into the middle class even as the global population grows.

Demand for manufactured products will rise along with global consumer spending. Competition will increase for infrastructure, energy, fresh water, steel and other raw materials. And any intelligent management of the economy will require ‘‘predictive model-based control’’, Nosbusch said.

Even without futurists, the evangelists of the new internet have their answer to a question that dogs industrial workers: is there still such a thing as a surefire job in manufacturing – one with family-supporting pay, like in the old days?

The answer is yes, but the ideal job candidate will be a programmer familiar with internet standards. ‘‘The speed of change,’’ Chambers says, ‘‘will spare no one.’’