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The Next Tech Revolution
L-Wave writes "Here is an interesting article on cincinnati.com about the next revolution in technology. "The Internet revolution was about people connecting with people. The next revolution will be about things connecting with things." The story mentions having "tags" on every possible items from glasses to grocery, and each one identifying itself on a network...very cool stuff." We've run some earlier stories about the Auto-ID Center and RFID tags. This is an important topic - it will be a huge social issue once people realize that consumer goods will come with tags that allow them to be tracked individually.
Which part of this is news? This area became hyped about 2 years ago. I don't mean to say that there should not be news on this subject, but the introduction was a bit... umm... exaggerated :)
There's couple of articles on the same area in here.
You're assuming some sort of gigantic centralized government database. But there are other possibilities.
Merchants will tag their inventory to protect themselves from theft, then log the inventory's movement on premises. Once you leave the store with it, your presence is detected by the local street safety patrol's monitors tracking you by your driver's license, until you enter your next destination, say the local pub. Inside the pub, you pay -- cash -- for a quick stimulant, with the cash register reading the embedded chip (which marks the bill as genuine with a unique serial number) and noting (courtesy of a tie-in to the IRS database which tracks all currency movement for tax assessment purpose) that you received that bill as change at the local florist's.
Next stop is a quick drive to your mother's to drop off her Mother's Day flowers, while the local security firm you pay to track the whereabouts of your late-model sportster registers your every turn.
Of course, Ma Bell also monitors your every step via your GPS-enabled cellphone so it can conveniently bombard you with advertising from whatever local business you're happening by at the moment.
I mean, it's sorta fun to think that the government/corporations/whoever really cares about me individually, and is devoting massive amounts of manpower and/or computer resources to tracking my shopping habits, but.. why would they bother?
You get the picture. No, there won't be a single centralized database monitoring every aspect of your life, but rather a myriad of local databases tracking just that portion of your activities in which it has a vested interest. Tying it all together later would require nothing more than a simple court warrant and an Internet connection. Or, I'm sure, private investigators could provide the same service for a fee.
We are done making cool invention(s).
is a defeatist view of the world and the creativity of humans. A century ago, people could not envision the computer as it is today, wireless communications as they are today.... To utter such ridiculous statements is akin to saying you don't think that humanmind has lost the ability to go beyond the known and delve into the unknown (then making it known and a new conundrum...). How depressing....we are from the government - we are here to help...
But if you find the remote, you won't need to buy a new one.
All this talk about connecting appliances into a network is ludicrus... sometimes a toaster is just a toaster. We don't need 'super appliances' that think, they would suffer from the vcr problem of being too complicated to use/control/program and most people would be stuck with the factory settings that they might not like.
It seems a lot of people seem to have gotten quite worked up about how useless this idea is. I would say that, like most technologies, the possible uses for these tags are limited largely by our imagination.
The the success of ePCs will depend on two things; firstly, that the wireless infrastructure is in place. The tags might cost a couple cents, but if the network isn't already in place, few people will will be interested, as not everyone wants to build their own wireless networks.
Secondly, industry will have to sell ePCs as cost-effective products that effeciently take care of specific tasks. That is, someone will have to make the tag that can fit in a pair of glasses. Tags that will be able to withstand freezing or heating, water, or any number of conditions.
Assuming that there are enough companies making the tags, and assuming that a signficant portion of the world is covered by free "tinyband" wirless networks, the possibilities are limitless.
If implanting a tag costs 1 cent, or even 5, then thousands of companies will become interested in adding these tags to their products. If the tags are easily programmable, then the manufacturing cost will be minimal, and thus worth the risk.
Some applications are almost inevitable; e.g. traffic control, shopping store uses, warehouse uses, etc., etc. RFID is already popular in these places, and tags are the next logical step. There will always be someone trying to improve RFID, and ePC tags are the most natural progression.
Other applications may be more difficult to bring into wide-spread use. For example, your shopping store might tag your groceries so that they can be instantly rung up at the cashier's counter. However, the canned soup company will probably be more reluctant to add a (second) tag to their product; this would require a high degree of specialization. This would first require that a large number of appliances can make use of specialized instructions embedded in various different tags. Only then would the soup company embed cooking instructions in an RFID tag.
Why not just read the instructions on the label? Well, if the soup company can make their soup cook itself, simply by sticking on a tag that costs a few cents, then the almost certainly WILL do that. You might still prefer to read the instructions, but that's a rather stupid view of things. It's in the soup company's best interest to add as much value to their product as possible. The few cents it will cost to produce a tag is well worth the value it will add to a product.
The only problem is that a large-scale infrastructure has to be in place first. This is where well thought-out standards will come into play. It will only work if the majority of tags are interoperable with the majority of scanning devices. That is, the cooking instructions in the soup tag should work with any model microwave.
This means that everyone from Campbell Soup to Nike to Safeway will have to start worrying about network communication protocols, as well as "APIs" for highly specialized tasks. For example, an API for embedding cooking instructions in a can of soup would be vastly different from the API for embedding chemical and medicinal data in a bottle of prescription pills. And yet, somehow, all these different applications have to interoperate on a single, seamless network, and the devices that use these tags will have to do the same.
I don't know how anyone will get all the soup makers and microwave manufacturers of the world to use the same cooking instruction API, delivered over a single communication protocol.
Chances are competition will lead to a vast array of incompatable tags and networks. Then billions will be spent on trying to glue all the incompatabilities together. It's so massive an undertaking that the smallest amount of fragmentation in standards could lead to widespread effects.
For example, if you have a type X microwave, and it can only read type Y cooking instruction tags, then you might be forced to always buy food with type Y tags (if you want the food to cook itself).
Thus, soup manufacturers would suddenly LOOSE market share, and this is not acceptable. Hence, standardization is key to widespread acceptance.
As for privacy concerns - I can't even imagine to think of the issues that will start to arise. Imagine a theif breaking into a house, and scanning all the RDIF tags, to figure out what products are in the building. Then he cross references the product data to price lists, and, like magic, he knows the estimated value and location of every product contained in the house. All he has to do is go pick up the most expensive products in the house - and that shouldn't be too hard, since the location of the tags are known.
Or imagine the same theif walking around the streets, scanning everything in sight, looking for valuable things to mug off of people.
I'm no expert on security, but I would imagine that RDIF is quite insecure and difficult to protect. How would any sort of authenticatation system work? You obviously don't want to embed an encrypted password in every stupid little product that you own. In fact, chances are that you won't be able to make any changes to the tags once they are manufactured and embedded into the product.
Essentially, it could be that someone could just stand outside your house, and get a list of all the things that you have inside, by scanning radio freqencies. You would have to protect your entire house from this sort of eavesdropping. The problems arising from this technology are numerous and difficult to overcome. Security is a huge issue, and if it can be addressed early on, this might even work someday.
None of the applications you've discussed actually require the RFIDs at all and the prescription medicine one requires considerably more than just RFIDs.
The variation in cooking power between microwaves wouldn't be fixed by sticking some kind of identifier on meals - they already have these, they're called barcodes. You're assuming every microwave is going to be programmed with some kind of lookup table telling it how to cook each item, which is all fine and dandy until I want to cook a product that was produced after the microwave and which it therefore knows nothing about.
If the wine lover really wants to know whats in here cellar she could knock up an Access database in ten minutes. Wine tends not to wander off once you've put it one place.
As for the prescription drugs - how exactly are RFIDs supposed to identify interactions? Firstly you need some kind of external reader unless you're planning on putting medicines in computerised bottles - remember these tags don't have any processing power. Second, you're assuming that there even is a universal database of drug interactions (its all potential interactions which depend a lot on the individual).
Ah, yes. Network everything. That'll solve a whole host of problems, like.......uhh... See, I always wished that my...uh......errr..
(*cough*CUECAT*cough*..)..
The whole point of invention is to solve a problem. The fact that my toaster lacks a login prompt doesn't qualify as a "problem" to anyone. I don't want a programmable heat grid in my toaster so I can burn little designs into my English muffins. I just want a friggin English muffin that isn't burnt on the outsides and soggy in the middle. Solve that first. I don't want a friggin SQL database running on my fridge. I want one that doesn't make my ice cubes smell, and no amount of TCP/IP is going to fix that. To my knowledge, there is no "Ice Cube Scent Removal" RFC.
The problem with whiz-bang ideas like this is, like the CueCat, that they don't solve any problems. Infact, they try to solve a problem that never existed in the first place. So lets suppose I have my whole apartment wired. My aquariums have webcams, my dishwasher floods both my network and my kitchen floor, and my television watches me instead of me watching it. What have I gained, other than an ego-erection? Bragging rights over my nerdy friends? Or a LAN crowded with garbage traffic, none of which will ever be used or implemented in any form other than for novely and amusement.
Put that in your socket and sniff it.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Now if they tie it to a clapper or some such so that I can find my glasses, then I might be tempted to go along with it.
It truth it really seems that acceptance of something like this will likely depend on how it's marketed. Help find old folks when they go drifting off from the nursing home, be used to determine that someone has fallen and can't get up. (6 hours without moving at the foot of the steps is a good sign) Imagine a lost or missing child, stolen artwork, etc. I can see viable, sensible uses for the technology, but at the same time have concerns over how it could be misused.
Trust me, there aren't any. Taiwanese, for example, love the idea of cameras monitoring one's every move. For Taiwanese, security trumps privacy any day of the week.
If it's tolerated in America, where privacy is so highly valued, it's tolerated everywhere else, too.