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The Internet of Things: Maybe you've heard of it, maybe you haven't.
Either way, there's a lot of confusion about what it actually is.
Is it the complete catalog of everything you can buy on Amazon?
A way to describe the darkest corners of the internet?
Is it a sort of secret network that's all around us and could fundamentally change the way we interact with nature?
Actually, yeah. So we're gonna explain it using something else that's mysterious and maybe a little confusing: a jellyfish.
Meet this moon jelly. We'll call him Charlie. Charlie doesn't have a brain, or at least not in the traditional sense, and yet he can swim around, eat stuff, avoid predators, and even make little baby moon jellies -- all because he has something called a nerve net. This nerve net gathers information about what's going on around him by detecting light, movement, the salinity of the water, even certain molecular signatures that distinguish friend from foe. Not bad, evolution.
Now, imagine if we had nerve nets made out of electronics, and imagine if we could put them anywhere, not just on our bodies -- like one big external nervous system.
These electronic nerve nets are called sensor networks, and they already exist. And when we connect these sensors to the internet, then just like Charlie, we can get real-time information about what's going on around us. These sensor networks were exactly what British entrepreneur Kevin Ashton had in mind back in 1999 when he first coined the term the Internet of Things.
Today, the Internet of Things is a hot term in the tech world.
There are now more than 1.3 billion gadgets connected to the internet, and we can expect this number to grow to between 30 and 50 billion by 2020.
Some of these devices are useful, like fitness trackers, smart thermostats, or home energy monitors, but a lot of them are pretty silly -- like egg trays that tell you when you're low on eggs. You know, in case you can't see that for yourself.
But the Internet of Things can be so much more than consumer devices, because as much as this is a technology for the guy who wants his smart coffee maker to know when he wakes up in the morning, it's also a technology for people who are totally psyched about the natural world and want to understand everything about it.
Just imagine how much better we'd be at living sustainably if we knew all about our environment and behavior. These sensor networks can measure pretty much anything about the natural world, like soil moisture, water flow, plant growth, seismic activity, air quality, glacier movement, livestock behavior. In fact, we could reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 9 gigatons by 2020 -- that's roughly equal to the 2010 emissions of India and the U.S. combined -- and we could do so using sensors to do things like regulate water use on farms, route vehicles around traffic, better match energy output with demand, and create more efficient internal heating systems. Of course, whoever's going to be putting these sensors out there should make sure that they're non-toxic and secure -- you don't want to hurt the very thing that we're trying to understand. And with that, maybe it's time for people who want to hear more about ice sheets than ice trays to start leading the conversation. To kick things off, I'd like to submit
The Techno Jelly Net as the new official name for the Internet of Things.
This way, maybe people will finally try to figure out what the hell it is.
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