Four predictions about the ways in which the IoT will impact our lives and workplaces a decade from now paint a future in which technology makes us better communicators, healthier eaters and more collaborative.
Would you implant a chip in your brain in order to quickly and easily access the Internet? Nearly half of the people who attended a future-focused session at the Cisco Live! conference, held this week in San Diego, Calif., said they would. Joseph Bradley,Cisco's Internet of Everything (IoE) evangelist and VP of the networking giant's IoE Practice Consulting Services (CCS), had posed the question as a way of talking about how his 2015 resolution was to "embrace his Millennial-ness." In line with that resolution, he indicated that he'd take the implant, too.
But the bigger point of the panel was to ask experts in a range of industries to predict how the IoT will impact their lives and careers by 2025. Sensum—a company that makes wearable devices that track eye movements and facial expressions, as well as detect electrical activity in the brain, as a means of helping marketers evaluate consumers' emotional response to content—outfitted nine members of the audience with sensors in order to track their emotional responses to the predictions. After each production was made, Sensum determined those attendees' "emotional positivity average."
The response from attendees, according to the Sensum data, was basically "meh." It barely registered a positive response.First up was Kate O'Keeffe, a Cisco executive who leads a project called Cisco Hyperinnovation Living Labs (CHILL), a consultancy that has worked with a number of Cisco customers, including Lowes, Costco, Visa and Nike, to develop products and services that leverage the Internet of Things. She predicted that by 2025, "resource scarcity will drive the kind of reforms businesses need to innovate." While corporations today resist collaboration, she said, the need for greater efficient use of resources and an imperative to innovate the way products are made and how industries operate will force companies to "work more closely together and in more networked ways." Would the IoT play a role in this greater collaboration? She didn't say, but presumably yes.
The second speaker was John Meister, senior VP at Panera Bread. His prediction was that by 2025, IoT-linked sensors will give consumers more power to understand the health-impacts of the foods they eat. He noted recent news that New York City's Health Department is considering requiring chain eateries to mark high-sodium foods, and that Panera has been called out as serving high-sodium foods in news reports about that potential requirement. Still, he said, arming consumers with more and better transparency into the foods they consume is good for public health.
Sensum's emote-o-meter showed an uptick after Meister's prediction, with a 40 percent emotional positivity average response among the sensor-wearing attendees.
Next, Rowan Trollope, senior VP and general manager of Cisco's Collaboration Technology Group, made what seemed to be the most bold and intriguing prediction. He first gave a timeline of the Internet, saying it was built between from 1985 to 2000 (technically, that's not true—the Internet was built beginning in the 1970s, but it came into wide use starting in 1985); from 2000 to 2015, he said, we've built it out; from now until 2030, Trollope asserted, we will be integrating it into everyday life.
Trollope provided that historical background in order to introduce a concept he called the "ambient compute fabric," which he said will power what he called "the invisible Internet." The details? Fuzzy at best, but his point was basically that we'll be living in a world with ubiquitous and lifelike tele-presence capabilities. Through this invisible Internet, the live-stream of Trollope's presentation in San Diego (which this reporter was watching on her laptop at her office in San Francisco) would feel far more real and interactive. Online audience members would be able to interact with others, and share their thoughts and opinions, as if they were physically there. But, he posited, thanks to the use of augmented-reality devices and artificial intelligence, the ambient compute fabric would actually "make us better communicators" than we are today. Whoa.
No more work travel? More time with the family? One might expect that the emotional positivity average for this prediction would be 100 percent. It was not, though it did rate the highest of all predictions, at about 75 percent.
Lastly, Joe Kann, Rockwell Automation's VP of global business development, predicted that by 2025, the IoT will change manufacturing in two important ways. It will enable far greater energy efficiency than we see today. And it will lead to far more autonomous, self-healing factory systems, which will accelerate the reduction of the manufacturing workforce.
"In 1980, 25 percent of the American workforce was in manufacturing. Today, it is 12 percent," Kann said. "By 2025, it will be in the single digits, maybe 4 to 5 percent, because of the wave of technology we're experiencing."
Those nine attendees outfitted with Sensum's sensors? Perhaps some considered this a rosy, cleaner future, while perhaps others mourned the loss of the skilled craftsman, because the emotional positivity average was just under 50 percent.
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