The Internet of Things: Could it really change the way we live?

Mercedes-Benz The car ‘as a private retreat’, the autonomous F 015 Luxury in Motion promises to be not just a vehicle, but a ‘digital living space’.
Mercedes-Benz: The car ‘as a private retreat’, the autonomous F 015 Luxury in Motion promises to be not just a vehicle, but a ‘digital living space’ Credit: Daimler AG

When it comes to predicting the future, Kevin Ashton is not a fan of what he calls ‘vague handwaving’. 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 flow.

BMW In collaboration with Intel and Amazon, the German car giant 
plans to launch a fleet 
of driverless cars by the end of the year. 
BMW: In collaboration with Intel and Amazon, the German car giant plans to launch a fleet of driverless cars  Credit: BMWGroup

Your car will drop you off 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. 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’.

In 2014, Wired magazine told its readers the internet of things (IoT) was already far bigger than anyone realised: ‘It’s going to make everything in our lives from streetlights to seaports “smart”.’ 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, buildings, etc, as well – 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 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.

He told me he was a writer (which he is, now). On his website, it said, ‘The only thing I can perhaps claim sole credit for is the name: three ungrammatical words that now label computing’s future.’ To be fair, he did a bit more than that.

The story of Ashton’s involvement with the technology that’s plotting your destiny goes something like this: as with many people now in their 40s and early 50s (Ashton was born in 1967), his childhood in London was spent tinkering with a Sinclair ZX81, marvelling at the day he was able to buy a ‘memory expansion pack’ and increase its computing prowess from 1KB to 16KB.

Kevin Ashton believes the internet 
of things 
could even help 
in our search for extraterrestrial life
Kevin Ashton believes the internet of things could even help in our search for extraterrestrial life Credit: Larry D. Moore

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 human-entered 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.

Volvo The company wants volunteers to test its self-driving XC90 Drive Me, equipped with cameras, radar and lidar (like radar but using a laser) for safety.
Volvo: The company wants volunteers to test its self-driving XC90 Drive Me, equipped with cameras, radar and lidar (like radar but using a laser) for safety

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 RFI technology. Ashton notes that his move corresponded with the growing popularity of the Harry Potter books.

‘Here I was at the real-life equivalent of Hogwarts, but I wasn’t a wizard,’ he says. ‘And I wondered when they were going to figure that out – that I was the guy who read Ibsen for four years and didn’t know anything about engineering.’

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.’

Ashton would later write a book about what he saw as this myth of creativity, How To Fly a Horse, published in 2015.

Uber, Google Maps and talking toasters

We meet up to talk IoT at a café in Austin one afternoon in April. One thing that annoys him is when journalists describe the internet of things solely in terms of household appliances. ‘It’s always about the f—ing kitchen,’ he says, laughing. ‘There’s this assumption that you have to make everything about refrigerators, but it’s not about your toaster or your fridge talking to your app.

‘If it has the word “smart” in it, it’s probably not very smart,’ he adds. ‘It’s probably not a very good idea, and it’s probably not part of the internet of things. No one calls Uber “smart taxis”, right? Or Google Maps “smart maps”. Smart razors? Terrible idea. There you go, it works. Let’s call it Ashton’s Law of Connected Objects.’

Ashton says the easiest analogy for 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 on 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 IoT possible.

Volkswagen The boxy, electric-motor-powered Sedric (from ‘self-driving car’) was unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show earlier this year. 
Volkswagen: The boxy, electric-motor-powered Sedric (from ‘self-driving car’) was unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show earlier this year Credit: Getty images 

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.’

How technology could help cure disease

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. ‘One of the biggest killers in the world is chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder – lung disease,’ Ashton explains. ‘People who suffer from this have episodes once in a while, and it’s important to catch those before they happen, because that’s what can kill them.

‘There are a couple of metrics they look for that can predict fairly accurately whether someone is going to have an episode. But then they realised it didn’t have to be a smartphone. Most people in developing countries have cellphones 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.

A MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov) telescope, 
La Palma. Connecting telescopes around the world has increased our understanding 
of the universe
A MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov) telescope, La Palma. Connecting telescopes around the world has increased our understanding of the universe Credit: Robert Wagner

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 at all – 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, ‘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 entire supply 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 the fields of transportation, agriculture, education, retail, 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. ‘When I was a kid in the 1970s, I think there was a scientific consensus that we may be the only place with life, and that was partly because we couldn’t see much beyond our solar system. Our view of the world was limited, but in the past 30 or 40 years, digital imaging, radio technology and computer analysis have become much better.’

Through 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.

‘This term “artificial intelligence”, which scares the crap out of people because they’ve seen The Terminator, is really nothing to be afraid of – it’s computers churning things and looking for unusual patterns.’ As for life on other planets, Ashton says it’s now just a question of where we’re going to find it, not if.

Questions of safety and security 

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, the key checks being, ‘Is this device only sharing data with those authorised to get it, and is this device only running authorised software?’ He goes on to explain that the problems we hear about at the moment are so-called denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, in which hackers co-opt lots of networked computers to overwhelm websites.

‘Traditionally,’ he says, ‘that’s been done by taking control of tens of thousands of Windows PCs. You download a free font but what you don’t know is it contains malicious code that sits quietly on your computer. Then, when someone tells it to, it targets a website. Well, last year someone realised you could co-opt devices such as thermostats because they’re computers too. So the same security risks you have with your laptop or desktop also exist with IoT devices.’

GM OnStar Subscribers can get web-based services including turn-by-turn navigation, automatic crash response and roadside assistance.
GM OnStar: Subscribers can get web-based services including turn-by-turn navigation, automatic crash response and roadside assistance.

Ashton is referring to a huge DoS attack last October on  a domain-registration service provider called Dyn, which counted Twitter, Netflix, Spotify and other huge internet companies among its clients. The result was that several major internet services suffered outage for several hours.

The implications for the economy and for business were staggering. But according to Ashton, there are even more serious concerns.

‘Ford has a navigation aid called Sync, and General Motors has a similar one known as OnStar,’ he explains. ‘In addition to navigation, you can talk to your mobile phone while you’re driving or tell your radio what station to go to.

'With the latest versions you can also use them to disable your vehicle if it’s been stolen, and they’ll tell you if the airbags have been deployed in an accident. So your car becomes a network computer, and the vulnerability there is that if I can hack into OnStar, I can take over your car. This is not hypothetical.’

Indeed, in 2015, security researchers hacked into a Jeep and managed to take over control of its brakes and transmission. The result: America’s National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration launched an investigation and 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.

'Experts in security have to be paranoid, think of all angles, close down as many of the vulnerabilities as they can, because their duty of care is to the customer.’

Waymo Pioneered by Google, Waymo self-driving cars first hit the road in California in 2009 and have been gaining traction across the US ever since.
Waymo: Pioneered by Google, Waymo self-driving cars first hit the road in California in 2009 and have been gaining traction across the US ever since.

Ashton is currently working on another book, and perhaps unsurprisingly it’s full of his predictions. The working title is 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 anti-science could stifle innovation.

‘It won’t change anything,’ he says immediately, as if anticipating the question. ‘Look at history. It never has. It’s a bit like one of those rides you let your kid go on: you can make it go a little faster or slower, but you can’t really control it much more than that. 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 ’90s, but look at tech exports. The world leader now is China and has been since the beginning of the internet of things. Number two is Germany. The US is number three, 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.’ 

License this content