From a new article of mine over at Fast Company – Inside The Near-Future World Where All Our Data And Machines Are In Constant Communication
This near-future is already unfolding—and it’s enabled by the convergence of a suite of technologies that have become cheap enough and powerful enough to work their way into the hardware of our lives. High-speed LTE wireless networks are nearly ubiquitous in most developed regions, connecting smart objects to each other and to remote services. These networks, combined with GPS and beacons, enable precise telemetry—the sharing of location, trajectories, and waypoints across transportation networks. Sensors have become much more sophisticated, miniaturized, and affordable, enabling devices at the edges of networks to scan and capture reality with tremendous fidelity. They pair with powerful computation riding the seemingly endless arc of Moore’s Law to crunch volumes of real-time data and turn it into analytics, predictive models, and algorithmic corrections.
This is how the brains of the Industrial Internet are forming, leveraging data from networks and sensors to model the world, evaluate contexts, predict outcomes, and respond and adapt to feedback. Now, these young capabilities are beginning to animate vehicles and ships, aircraft and robots. And, as we’ll see, they’re starting to socialize and collaborate.
