The Internet of Things Will Make Everyone A Programmer (Part I)

November 5, 2013

This is the first post in a series I entitle “Why The Internet of Things Will Make Everyone a Programmer”. This is a claim that will not be addressed until the third or fourth entry, as first I would like to give a background on both the theory and development of such an infrastructure.

There’s been a lot of talk recently on The Internet of Things (IoT), but in case you haven’t heard about it, here’s a good excerpt from Kevin Ashton, who initially proposed the concept: “Today computers—and, therefore, the Internet—are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information…conventional diagrams of the Internet … leave out the most numerous and important routers of all - people…we’re physical, and so is our environment…ideas and information are important, but things matter much more. Yet today’s information technology is so dependent on data originated by people that our computers know more about ideas than things. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything…[we would] know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best.” The core concept behind this idea goes further back than Ashton’s own explanation, to a theoretical device developed in 1945 by Vannevar Bush called the memex, a compound of the words “memory” and “extender”.

According to the theory behind this device, “a record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.”

The memex is more commonly attributed as an early system of hyperlinks, due to the nature of the device requiring the ability to create associative links between items or documents. These links could be combined to form trails of information items, and any two items could be coded for associative selection, allowing for both linking and personalization. The difference with Bush’s memex and the IoT is that the memex would contain all books, records, and other communications. The memex is a direct evolutionary predecessor to the IoT, in which we can think of the Internet infrastructure as the memex itself, and these books, records and communications are linked within this infrastructure through indirect associations.

There is a clear distinction between our ability to construct such a device in the present age as an early prototype compared to that of a full-fledged memex. There is, to some degree, a cognitive component to a memex’s processing capability. The device itself needs to be able to construct, through metadata, a system of links between information that it contains and sort through information acquired at later points in time in order to construct links to previously absorbed knowledge. Google’s brain simulator may have been taught how to recognize a cat, but we are still a long way away from harnessing the theoretical power of a memex to construct a system of high-level knowledge across all collected information.

However, the IoT shifts the technical challenges posed by a cognizant memex. With the IoT, the information that would be provided by cognizance is shifted to a system of components that have the ability to communicate with each other, with each component able provide a full set of data that may or may not be relevant to the operation imposed by the communicating device. This means that, for predefined operations, a device could obtain a relevant set of dynamic data, even if it did not necessarily know what that data would contain.

Additionally, these devices are not stagnant in their capacity—data capacity itself would not be an issue as it could be stored in an offsite location, additional instructions could easily be programmed in, and a common language between these devices would allow for extended levels of communication and an increase of communication messages without the necessity to change the types of raw data that the devices can acquire. It becomes less of a data acquisition issue, and more of a data-mining issue. Although there is no cognizance, by breaking the information containers into small components, or “things”, there is a greater informational relevance that each device can contribute to a digital infrastructure than a memex could for all the information it stores. This addresses the missing components of a memex, search and metadata, while the associative trail is something that can be programmed and updated.

All this may explain the value of the IoT, but it is still only purely a theoretical exploration of the value to data. I do not plan on exploring in-depth applications that an IoT contributes to—many other articles outline potential biometric application, energy benefits, productivity, and efficiency. These are all self-evident, as any (or at least most) advances in computing infrastructure have demonstrated.

However, what I will explore is how decreasing costs in microchip technology, ever-increasing computing power, and the growth of interconnectivity within our global community will stress the importance of technology literacy, and I will discuss why all people will need to have the skills necessary to program such devices.