Kevin Ashton
Thank you, and thank you for asking me to speak at the Third Internet of Things Week. . I am sorry I can’t be with you in Helsinki. This is a vibrant and growing community of stakeholders. I am proud to have been a part of it for about 15 years now.
One of the most important things that is going to happen this week is the work on IOT-A. It is really important to have a reference model architecture for the Internet of Things. And one of the reasons is that for most of those 15 years, we’ve been talking about the Internet of Things as something in the future, and, thanks to amazing work by this community — I would particularly like to recognize Rob van Kranenburg and Gérald Santucci and the work of the European Union, which has been amazing for many, many years now — the Internet of Things is not the future anymore. The Internet of Things is the present. It is here, now.
I was with an RFID company a month ago who told me that they had sold 2 billion RFID tags last year and were expecting to sell 3 billion RFID tags this year.
So, just in 2 years, this one company has sold almost as many RFID tags as there are people on the planet. And, of course, RFID is just one tiny part of the Internet of Things, which includes many sensors, many actuators, 3-D printing, and some amazing work in mobile computing and mobile sensing platforms from modern automobiles, which are really now sensors on wheels, and will become more so as, as we move into an age of driverless cars, to the amazing mobile devices we all have in our pockets, that I know some of you are looking at right now. Then there are sensor platforms in the air. There is some really amazing work being done in the civilian sector with drones, or “unmanned aerial vehicles.: that are not weapons of war or tools of government surveillance but are sensor platforms for other things.
And all this amazing technology, which is being brought to life right now, is connected together by the Internet, and we can only imagine what is coming next.
But one thing I know for sure is, now that the Internet of Things is the present and not the future, we have a whole new set of problems to solve. And they’re big problems. And they’re to do with architecture, and scalability, and data science. How do we make sure that all the information flowing from these sensors to these control systems is synchronized and harmonized, and can be synthesized in a way that brings meaning to data. It is great that the Internet of Things is here. But we have to recognize we have a lot more work to do.
It is not just important to do the work. It is important to understand why the work is important. The Internet of Things is a world changing technology like no other. We need it now more than ever. There are immeasurable economic benefits and the world needs economic benefits right now. But there is another piece that we mustn’t lose sight of.
We depend on things. We can’t eat data. We can’t put data in our cars to make them go. Data will not keep us warm.
And there are more people needing more things than ever before. So unless we bring the power of our information technology — which, today, is mainly based around entertainment, and personal communication, and photographs, and emails — unless we bring the power of our information technology to the world of things, we won’t have enough things to go around.
The human race is going to continue to grow. The quality of our lives is going to continue to grow, The length of our lives is going to continue to grow. And so the task for this new generation of technology and this new generation of technologists is to bring tools to bear on the problems of scaling the human race.
It is really that simple.
Every generation has a challenge, and this is ours. If we do not succeed, people are going to be hungry, people are going to be sick, people are going to be cold, people are going to be thirsty, and the problems that we suffer from will be more than economic.
I have no doubt that we have to build this network and no doubt, that is going to help us solve the problems of future generations by doing a much more effective job of how we manage the stuff that we depend on for survival.
So, I hope everyone has a great week. It is really important work. I am delighted to be a small part of it. I am delighted that you all are in Helsinki right now. May you meet new people, make new friends, build great new technology.
Have a great week.