February 15, 2013 • 14 mins
Is the Internet of Things more than just customizable environments? How will it impact the efficiency of civic and industrial systems? What will these changes mean for you and me? Listen in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Greetings everyone, Welcome to Forward Thinking. I am
your host, Jonathan Strickland, joined by my fellow co hosts
who are going to introduce themselves now. I am Lauren
voc Obam. I am Joe McCormick, and these two people
(00:22):
are part of the brain trust that keeps Forward Thinking going.
We are looking at topics that are going to be
really important to us in the future, how they're going
to affect us as human beings. And one of the
things that we wanted to talk about was this concept
of the Internet of things. Now, Lauren, if I came
up to you and I said, what is this Internet
(00:43):
of things concept? I just don't understand. How would you
describe it? Well, basically, it's the idea that all of
the devices that we use, not just our computers and
our cell phones, but also our cars and our houses,
are going to be communicating with each other in order
to provide the best environment possible for every human person. Right.
This idea that we're going to have ubiquitous sensors around
us constantly gathering data, crunching that data in some sort
(01:07):
of way, and then using the data in different ways,
whether that's to serve it up to us saying, oh,
by the way, your energy usage this month has been
such and such, or oh, by the way, you've burned
x number of calories because you did all this running
around today, or it will actually make devices behave in
a very specific way, and it kind of takes human
(01:28):
interaction completely out of that equation, so that your thermostat,
for example, might adjust itself based upon the weather and
maybe even your own bodies temperature. So it's kind of
this neat idea of technology shaping the world around us. Uh, Joe,
why don't we talk a little bit about what the
video kind of covered and what we're gonna cover today. Okay, Well,
(01:51):
in the video, we were talking about how we focused
a lot on how the Internet of Things will change
the end user experience of the world, and and by
that I mean just the way the world looks to
you and me um And we talked about customizable environments,
which means that you know, the room in your house
might have any number of hidden elements that are conspiring
(02:14):
to make your life more comfortable and easier, and they're
taking data to learn what you like and and and
how to fit you best. So this could be lighting
and music, environmental control like you were saying, Um, but
I thought in this podcast one thing that would be
interesting to talk about would be an even more invisible
aspect of how the Internet of Things will change society,
(02:36):
which is how it will change efficiency in the processes
we don't always see in industry, in civic systems, sure
care anything, Yeah, yeah, I mean we're talking again about
devices that are are taking endless measurements and then sending
that data back in some fashion to make our lives
easier and uh. And in manufacturing, that's a very simple
(03:00):
way of of changing huge outcomes. I mean, manufacturing processes
have changed quite a bit ever since the Industrial Revolution,
but the idea of the Internet Things could bring that
to an even more precise level. Right when you have
machines that have computers at every single stop gap of
the process that are you know, calling home and telling
(03:22):
you what the machine is doing, how efficient it's being,
how fast the motors are running, how fast the products
being turned out, then you can you can use that
to completely optimize everything every step of the way, and furthermore,
have that machine tell you when it's about to break. Yeah,
which of course would be a huge benefit you if
you already know that you need to do some preventive
(03:43):
maintenance on a machine before it breaks down. Uh, that
can mean the difference between a profitable month or a disaster.
And Joe, you you have a story you were telling
us earlier about kind of you gave us a scenario
where this makes sense. Oh yeah, Well, I mean you
just have to imagine you're you're in a furniture factory.
Maybe you're the floor manager there, and you produce a
(04:07):
certain kind of upholstered chair. Now, you know, for a
while it's been taking X number of hours to complete
the production from you know, when you first get the
parts until when you ship it. Suddenly, this month it's
taking twice as long now in lots of factories. You
might have no idea why, because we've got humans dealing
with the machines at every step along the way, and
(04:28):
you have no devices to really track the difference in
how long it takes to produce this thing and give
real time analytics and feedback. With the Internet of Things,
each particular cog along the production line is both uploading
and downloading information, so the production line itself is teaching
and learning right, So then by the if there is
(04:51):
something that's that's causing a slower production than normal, you
can actually see where the bottlenecks occurring. And then or
if the if it's an intelligent enough system, it anticipates
that and fixes it so that you never have that
problem to start with. Uh, it's definitely something that could
impact us down the line. This is something that you know,
anyone who works in that industry, obviously it would affect them.
(05:14):
But if you're asking, all right, well how about the
average person, the consumer, how would that affect this person? Well,
increased efficiencies could mean that you see prices start to
come down on products because it takes less money to
produce them, and as competition rises, that could see that
the prices come down. You know, you don't have to
worry about that profit margin being affected because the cost
(05:36):
of production and has gone down so that you can
actually lower the cost to the consumer. That doesn't always happen. Obviously,
we have industries out there where the cost of productions
come down, let's keep the price the same way. But
it's something that could happen sure, and if it happens
in your industry, that means and you get to hypothetically
make more money, so it's not a bad thing either. No,
that that tends to make shareholders very happy as it
(05:58):
turns out, And you were mentioned Joe also about the
the civic uses. One of my favorite illustrations of the
Internet of Things is the idea that with the true
implementation of the Internet things, that it's at its most
pervasive level, traffic doesn't exist. It can be completely automated,
so that, for example, if you live in say Atlanta,
(06:20):
like the three of us do, and have to commute
through Atlanta like the three of us do, then you
don't get in traffic jams that take up how many
how many hours a week? It's the average, it's like
for the average Atlanta and I think they spend around
half an hour per uh per trip. Yeah, it's it's well,
it could be more than that actually, because I think
in Atlanta the average commute is close to around thirty miles,
(06:44):
which is that's a that's a long commute for someone
who lives in the city where they're working. It means
that a lot of us are not living very close
to wherever our offices are. And on top of that,
Atlanta traffic is pretty bad. It's it does regularly rank
in those top cities of bad traffic cities like Los
Angeles or New York or d C. There are several
(07:07):
in the United States that are known as being bad
when you're a driver, just for the sense of how
much time you're going to spend sitting in traffic. But
with the Internet of Things, you could have all these
devices that detect changes in traffic and either relay that
information to drivers so that they can react proactively and
(07:28):
take a different route so that they're no longer at
risk of being delayed because of a change in traffic,
or if you pair this with say an autonomous car,
the cars themselves start to adjust without your input at all,
and next thing you know, you're where you need to be.
Um and beyond that, we're talking about improvements that could
(07:48):
allow things like dynamic control of traffic signals. So the
example I always give is, imagine you're driving home at
three in the morning, as the three of us often
are doing, but because we burned the midnight oil at
our office, not because we're all party animals. That's also true,
but not not material. But you're driving home at three
(08:09):
in the morning, and you get to that infamous traffic
stop where the light has turned red and you know
you're going to be sitting there for three minutes while
there's no cross traffic at all. With a truly dynamic system,
the traffic components already know you're approaching, they already know
there's no traffic coming the other way, and they change
all the yeah. So that means at three in the morning,
(08:31):
you have the magical experience of all green lights all
the time, so that red lights when you see them,
become uh, something that's unusual and hopefully you remember what
to do. But but more importantly, well, that same principle
could be translated to matters of life and death, not
just convenience. I mean, if you imagine um the problems
(08:53):
that are first responder encounters. You know, I don't know
if you ever had that experience of you're sitting in
traffic at rush hour and nobody's moving, and suddenly behind
you you hear a siren and you see an ambulance
coming through and it just can't penetrate them, and there's
nothing you can do. There's something it can do. Everyone
is at a standstill, right, It's just stuck, and you know,
in the back of that ambulance, somebody you know, could
(09:15):
be dying and they have to get through, but they can't. Now,
imagine if the traffic grid was smart, if the cars
were smart, they were all communicating, If the traffic lights
were smart, they were all communicating. The grid itself could
clear a path because it knows where the first responder
needs to go. You know, before you even heard the
(09:35):
siren that it was coming that you needed to pull over.
The traffic lights would know, so they could block off
traffic from cross streets. Yeah, this is truly a matter
of life and death. It could mean that it saves lives.
This the internet things could literally save and prolonged life
in that fashion. And beyond that, it's it's something that
could also impact on a macro scale, our energy use
(09:58):
and and even our energy production. Lauren, you were telling
me about something along those lines. Yeah, if if railways
were smarter, they could use GPS two track trains. Also
the add in the length and the and the load
into the data and minimax the performance and fuel usage.
Um Also with the production of energy itself, you could
have wind turbines that no one to shut down due
(10:20):
to danger from high winds. At an individual level, they
could they could be detecting what's going on with the
weather if if they start freezing up in the winter
automatically speed up to knock off ice. One wind farm
in particular did to study where they input a whole
bunch of the smart technology and over the course of
a year, they had about a three pc increase in
energy output, which sounds really small until you take into
(10:41):
consideration that that's one point two million dollars in additional revenue. Tiny,
tiny changes in industries can end up having huge impacts
down the road. It's uh, it can be very simple
to sort of right off something where you hear of
small percentage, but it means a big change. I mean,
especially or something as large as as energy production. So
(11:02):
you're talking about having this this system that can intelligently
react to different different inputs, whether it's environmental or or
performance or even a human factor and be able to
adjust so that's giving the most efficient output. I mean,
that's an amazing story. And obviously once we reach this
(11:24):
point in the world, our experiences day to day will
be very different. I think because we you know, things
like traffic, I can't imagine you know what a generation
who grows up without traffic would feel like if suddenly
there was a traffic jam. You know, the green light
scenario sounds like magic to me. It does again Arthur C.
Clark right there saying about the you know, as as
(11:46):
technologies get more sophisticated, they eventually reach a point where
they are indistinguishable from magic, and that would be a
wonderful world to live in. I do I do worry
about living in a world that would occasionally need to
control all delete uh, but you know, we tried turning
it off and on again. But that that to me.
The bonuses, the positives about this world are so phenomenal
(12:10):
that it would be unthinkable not to pursue them. Sure,
and lots of lots of companies are doing that currently.
The g is calling it the industrial Internet right now.
IBM has a phrase that they're calling Smarter Planet. Cisco,
of course, has the Internet of Everything that they keep
talking about. Sure. Yeah, So everyone has a different kind
of way of summing this up in a in a
(12:31):
little a little title, but it's it's all saying the
same thing. Yeah. The point is is that it's incredibly
worthwhile financially and environmentally and socially. Yeah, so I'm I'm
excited to see this world come about. I cannot wait
to find out what my own personal reality is going
to be, especially considering that I won't have to worry
(12:51):
about traffic anymore. That that I I know, I go
on about that, but really, if you've lived in a
place where there's been a lot of traffic, I can
you all understand it? The idea of no traffic is
something that we think. It's just a fairy tale. I
think we should get in on it. The naming, Oh yeah,
well we'll have to come up with our own version
(13:12):
names so we can get in on the ground floor. Right, Yeah,
well we'll start. We'll start brainstorming names for the Internet
of Things. I vote Dave, but other names are are
fully it's all up to discussion. Just remember my decisions
final and then we're all good. Um and guys, we're
going to have this amazing websites launching on March first,
(13:34):
and it's called forward Thinking dot com. That's f w
thinking dot com. At that site, you're going to be
able to find copies of our audio podcast. You're gonna
be able to see the video series Forward Thinking, which
is really amazing, and you're going to be able to
read some blog posts written by these two amazing co
host of mine, also some written by me as well.
(13:55):
Uh So, I highly encourage you to go to that
website check it out. Uh once it launches on March one.
It's really going to be something special. I'm very excited
about it, and I'm excited to see the future. Guys,
hope you are too a little bit kind of Joe
dout alright, excellent, We're all in agreement here. I hope
you guys are too out there and we hope to
(14:17):
hear from you soon. For more on this topic in
the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought
to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Greetings everyone, Welcome to Forward Thinking. I am
your host, Jonathan Strickland, joined by my fellow co hosts
who are going to introduce themselves now. I am Lauren
voc Obam. I am Joe McCormick, and these two people
(00:22):
are part of the brain trust that keeps Forward Thinking going.
We are looking at topics that are going to be
really important to us in the future, how they're going
to affect us as human beings. And one of the
things that we wanted to talk about was this concept
of the Internet of things. Now, Lauren, if I came
up to you and I said, what is this Internet
(00:43):
of things concept? I just don't understand. How would you
describe it? Well, basically, it's the idea that all of
the devices that we use, not just our computers and
our cell phones, but also our cars and our houses,
are going to be communicating with each other in order
to provide the best environment possible for every human person. Right.
This idea that we're going to have ubiquitous sensors around
us constantly gathering data, crunching that data in some sort
(01:07):
of way, and then using the data in different ways,
whether that's to serve it up to us saying, oh,
by the way, your energy usage this month has been
such and such, or oh, by the way, you've burned
x number of calories because you did all this running
around today, or it will actually make devices behave in
a very specific way, and it kind of takes human
(01:28):
interaction completely out of that equation, so that your thermostat,
for example, might adjust itself based upon the weather and
maybe even your own bodies temperature. So it's kind of
this neat idea of technology shaping the world around us. Uh, Joe,
why don't we talk a little bit about what the
video kind of covered and what we're gonna cover today. Okay, Well,
(01:51):
in the video, we were talking about how we focused
a lot on how the Internet of Things will change
the end user experience of the world, and and by
that I mean just the way the world looks to
you and me um And we talked about customizable environments,
which means that you know, the room in your house
might have any number of hidden elements that are conspiring
(02:14):
to make your life more comfortable and easier, and they're
taking data to learn what you like and and and
how to fit you best. So this could be lighting
and music, environmental control like you were saying, Um, but
I thought in this podcast one thing that would be
interesting to talk about would be an even more invisible
aspect of how the Internet of Things will change society,
(02:36):
which is how it will change efficiency in the processes
we don't always see in industry, in civic systems, sure
care anything, Yeah, yeah, I mean we're talking again about
devices that are are taking endless measurements and then sending
that data back in some fashion to make our lives
easier and uh. And in manufacturing, that's a very simple
(03:00):
way of of changing huge outcomes. I mean, manufacturing processes
have changed quite a bit ever since the Industrial Revolution,
but the idea of the Internet Things could bring that
to an even more precise level. Right when you have
machines that have computers at every single stop gap of
the process that are you know, calling home and telling
(03:22):
you what the machine is doing, how efficient it's being,
how fast the motors are running, how fast the products
being turned out, then you can you can use that
to completely optimize everything every step of the way, and furthermore,
have that machine tell you when it's about to break. Yeah,
which of course would be a huge benefit you if
you already know that you need to do some preventive
(03:43):
maintenance on a machine before it breaks down. Uh, that
can mean the difference between a profitable month or a disaster.
And Joe, you you have a story you were telling
us earlier about kind of you gave us a scenario
where this makes sense. Oh yeah, Well, I mean you
just have to imagine you're you're in a furniture factory.
Maybe you're the floor manager there, and you produce a
(04:07):
certain kind of upholstered chair. Now, you know, for a
while it's been taking X number of hours to complete
the production from you know, when you first get the
parts until when you ship it. Suddenly, this month it's
taking twice as long now in lots of factories. You
might have no idea why, because we've got humans dealing
with the machines at every step along the way, and
(04:28):
you have no devices to really track the difference in
how long it takes to produce this thing and give
real time analytics and feedback. With the Internet of Things,
each particular cog along the production line is both uploading
and downloading information, so the production line itself is teaching
and learning right, So then by the if there is
(04:51):
something that's that's causing a slower production than normal, you
can actually see where the bottlenecks occurring. And then or
if the if it's an intelligent enough system, it anticipates
that and fixes it so that you never have that
problem to start with. Uh, it's definitely something that could
impact us down the line. This is something that you know,
anyone who works in that industry, obviously it would affect them.
(05:14):
But if you're asking, all right, well how about the
average person, the consumer, how would that affect this person? Well,
increased efficiencies could mean that you see prices start to
come down on products because it takes less money to
produce them, and as competition rises, that could see that
the prices come down. You know, you don't have to
worry about that profit margin being affected because the cost
(05:36):
of production and has gone down so that you can
actually lower the cost to the consumer. That doesn't always happen. Obviously,
we have industries out there where the cost of productions
come down, let's keep the price the same way. But
it's something that could happen sure, and if it happens
in your industry, that means and you get to hypothetically
make more money, so it's not a bad thing either. No,
that that tends to make shareholders very happy as it
(05:58):
turns out, And you were mentioned Joe also about the
the civic uses. One of my favorite illustrations of the
Internet of Things is the idea that with the true
implementation of the Internet things, that it's at its most
pervasive level, traffic doesn't exist. It can be completely automated,
so that, for example, if you live in say Atlanta,
(06:20):
like the three of us do, and have to commute
through Atlanta like the three of us do, then you
don't get in traffic jams that take up how many
how many hours a week? It's the average, it's like
for the average Atlanta and I think they spend around
half an hour per uh per trip. Yeah, it's it's well,
it could be more than that actually, because I think
in Atlanta the average commute is close to around thirty miles,
(06:44):
which is that's a that's a long commute for someone
who lives in the city where they're working. It means
that a lot of us are not living very close
to wherever our offices are. And on top of that,
Atlanta traffic is pretty bad. It's it does regularly rank
in those top cities of bad traffic cities like Los
Angeles or New York or d C. There are several
(07:07):
in the United States that are known as being bad
when you're a driver, just for the sense of how
much time you're going to spend sitting in traffic. But
with the Internet of Things, you could have all these
devices that detect changes in traffic and either relay that
information to drivers so that they can react proactively and
(07:28):
take a different route so that they're no longer at
risk of being delayed because of a change in traffic,
or if you pair this with say an autonomous car,
the cars themselves start to adjust without your input at all,
and next thing you know, you're where you need to be.
Um and beyond that, we're talking about improvements that could
(07:48):
allow things like dynamic control of traffic signals. So the
example I always give is, imagine you're driving home at
three in the morning, as the three of us often
are doing, but because we burned the midnight oil at
our office, not because we're all party animals. That's also true,
but not not material. But you're driving home at three
(08:09):
in the morning, and you get to that infamous traffic
stop where the light has turned red and you know
you're going to be sitting there for three minutes while
there's no cross traffic at all. With a truly dynamic system,
the traffic components already know you're approaching, they already know
there's no traffic coming the other way, and they change
all the yeah. So that means at three in the morning,
(08:31):
you have the magical experience of all green lights all
the time, so that red lights when you see them,
become uh, something that's unusual and hopefully you remember what
to do. But but more importantly, well, that same principle
could be translated to matters of life and death, not
just convenience. I mean, if you imagine um the problems
(08:53):
that are first responder encounters. You know, I don't know
if you ever had that experience of you're sitting in
traffic at rush hour and nobody's moving, and suddenly behind
you you hear a siren and you see an ambulance
coming through and it just can't penetrate them, and there's
nothing you can do. There's something it can do. Everyone
is at a standstill, right, It's just stuck, and you know,
in the back of that ambulance, somebody you know, could
(09:15):
be dying and they have to get through, but they can't. Now,
imagine if the traffic grid was smart, if the cars
were smart, they were all communicating, If the traffic lights
were smart, they were all communicating. The grid itself could
clear a path because it knows where the first responder
needs to go. You know, before you even heard the
(09:35):
siren that it was coming that you needed to pull over.
The traffic lights would know, so they could block off
traffic from cross streets. Yeah, this is truly a matter
of life and death. It could mean that it saves lives.
This the internet things could literally save and prolonged life
in that fashion. And beyond that, it's it's something that
could also impact on a macro scale, our energy use
(09:58):
and and even our energy production. Lauren, you were telling
me about something along those lines. Yeah, if if railways
were smarter, they could use GPS two track trains. Also
the add in the length and the and the load
into the data and minimax the performance and fuel usage.
Um Also with the production of energy itself, you could
have wind turbines that no one to shut down due
(10:20):
to danger from high winds. At an individual level, they
could they could be detecting what's going on with the
weather if if they start freezing up in the winter
automatically speed up to knock off ice. One wind farm
in particular did to study where they input a whole
bunch of the smart technology and over the course of
a year, they had about a three pc increase in
energy output, which sounds really small until you take into
(10:41):
consideration that that's one point two million dollars in additional revenue. Tiny,
tiny changes in industries can end up having huge impacts
down the road. It's uh, it can be very simple
to sort of right off something where you hear of
small percentage, but it means a big change. I mean,
especially or something as large as as energy production. So
(11:02):
you're talking about having this this system that can intelligently
react to different different inputs, whether it's environmental or or
performance or even a human factor and be able to
adjust so that's giving the most efficient output. I mean,
that's an amazing story. And obviously once we reach this
(11:24):
point in the world, our experiences day to day will
be very different. I think because we you know, things
like traffic, I can't imagine you know what a generation
who grows up without traffic would feel like if suddenly
there was a traffic jam. You know, the green light
scenario sounds like magic to me. It does again Arthur C.
Clark right there saying about the you know, as as
(11:46):
technologies get more sophisticated, they eventually reach a point where
they are indistinguishable from magic, and that would be a
wonderful world to live in. I do I do worry
about living in a world that would occasionally need to
control all delete uh, but you know, we tried turning
it off and on again. But that that to me.
The bonuses, the positives about this world are so phenomenal
(12:10):
that it would be unthinkable not to pursue them. Sure,
and lots of lots of companies are doing that currently.
The g is calling it the industrial Internet right now.
IBM has a phrase that they're calling Smarter Planet. Cisco,
of course, has the Internet of Everything that they keep
talking about. Sure. Yeah, So everyone has a different kind
of way of summing this up in a in a
(12:31):
little a little title, but it's it's all saying the
same thing. Yeah. The point is is that it's incredibly
worthwhile financially and environmentally and socially. Yeah, so I'm I'm
excited to see this world come about. I cannot wait
to find out what my own personal reality is going
to be, especially considering that I won't have to worry
(12:51):
about traffic anymore. That that I I know, I go
on about that, but really, if you've lived in a
place where there's been a lot of traffic, I can
you all understand it? The idea of no traffic is
something that we think. It's just a fairy tale. I
think we should get in on it. The naming, Oh yeah,
well we'll have to come up with our own version
(13:12):
names so we can get in on the ground floor. Right, Yeah,
well we'll start. We'll start brainstorming names for the Internet
of Things. I vote Dave, but other names are are
fully it's all up to discussion. Just remember my decisions
final and then we're all good. Um and guys, we're
going to have this amazing websites launching on March first,
(13:34):
and it's called forward Thinking dot com. That's f w
thinking dot com. At that site, you're going to be
able to find copies of our audio podcast. You're gonna
be able to see the video series Forward Thinking, which
is really amazing, and you're going to be able to
read some blog posts written by these two amazing co
host of mine, also some written by me as well.
(13:55):
Uh So, I highly encourage you to go to that
website check it out. Uh once it launches on March one.
It's really going to be something special. I'm very excited
about it, and I'm excited to see the future. Guys,
hope you are too a little bit kind of Joe
dout alright, excellent, We're all in agreement here. I hope
you guys are too out there and we hope to
(14:17):
hear from you soon. For more on this topic in
the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought
to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.