On Thursday, 8 June, at 1:30PM CEST, I am participating in a panel discussion called “Emerging Threats and Paradigm Shift” during the IoT Week 2017 in Geneva, where we will talk about many of these issues. In this post, I’ll expand on some of my thinking that will inform my comments on the panel.
It is still common to think of an IoT as a “thing” – a smart object, something that is not just a general-purpose computer, connected to the Internet. But this is not what the IoT already is, and certainly not where it is heading. And if we want to address the challenges the IoT brings, we need to look ahead.
We do not want just to have a light bulb whose colour we can change using a smartphone application. We want to automate our whole house so when we dine the ambient light is different from when we read a book, maybe different depending on the season, room temperature, or mood.
We do not want just to measure traffic movements along the city transportation system, but tie it with the temperature, air pollution, and other data gathered by thousands of sensors. And we want to optimize it by managing traffic lights and signalling preferred routes to cars.