by Angela Guess
Bruce Schneier recently wrote in Forbes, “The Internet of Things will increasingly perform actions for us and in our name. Increasingly, human intervention will be unnecessary. The sensors will collect data. The systems smarts will interpret the data and figure out what to do. And the actuators will do things in our world. You can think of the sensors as the eyes and ears of the Internet, the actuators as the hands and feet of the Internet, and the stuff in the middle as the brain. This makes the future clearer. The Internet now senses, thinks, and acts. We’re building a world-sized robot, and we don’t even realize it. I’ve started calling this robot the World-Sized Web.”
Schneier goes on, “The World-Sized Web—can I call it WSW?—is more than just the Internet of Things. Much of the WSW’s brains will be in the cloud, on servers connected via cellular, Wi-Fi, or short-range data networks. It’s mobile, of course, because many of these things will move around with us, like our smartphones. And it’s persistent. You might be able to turn off small pieces of it here and there, but in the main the WSW will always be on, and always be there. None of these technologies are new, but they’re all becoming more prevalent. I believe that we’re at the brink of a phase change around information and networks. The difference in degree will become a difference in kind. That’s the robot that is the WSW.”
photo credit: Flickr/ Schlusselbein2007