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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.
Neat stuff. I really like the concept of self-serve grocery checkouts myself. Typical paranoia though:
it will be a huge social issue once people realize that consumer goods will come with tags that allow them to be tracked individually
Maybe I just don't get it. Keeping tabs on 300 million US citizens is well-nigh impossible - noone cares about the individual, and actually logging this much data is pretty much a moot point. Now imagine this extended to several hundred BILLION consumer goods. Do we really have anything approcahing the capability to DO anything with this much data, let alone something bad? 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?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I wish I had patented it. I had this idea about 2 years' ago, and to be fair probably a lot of other people did too.
The concept is simple- putting tags on everything which just gives them a unique id. Then you create a bridge between the internet and the physical world.
Examples:
1) Your car HUD can warn you of drivers who have been "modded down" when you see them on the road.
2) In the store, you can look up reviews of consumer electronics items by scanning the item.
3) Email people you walk past on the street if they have made their email public- also dating services can tell you if you are compatible, if they are single etc.
4) Scan tags on famous landmarks and get taken to pages of info on them.
5) Each shop and cafe you walk past has a tag so you can go to its home page and check its prices and offers.
6) Returning stolen items to their owners (if you make the tags non-removeable).
I'm sure you can think of many more applications...
graspee
This will be great for burglars. Just drive down the street with a high-powered RF scanner and inventory every house before deciding on the one with the best stuff.
When you're finished you put the scanner in a terminal which prints your receipt. with this receipt you go to a special (selfscanning only) checkout to pay.
No lines, saves time
You can always see how musch you're spending
You can bag while you shop, saves time
:)
Stealing is pretty easy this way but i wouldn't there because there are random checks. And if you get caught there are evere punishments
It's a neat and cool system but i haven't seen it anywhere else? Has anybody else seen this system before?
The reason that we've spent all these billions of dollars to set up the internet, for people to communicate with people, is because we, and by we I mean the human race, really want to communicate with eachother.
My can of deodorant has no intrinsic desire to socialise with it's own kind. Whence, then, comes the impetus to enable it to do so?
If a consumer good is valuable enough to justify this kind of outlay (in a commercial setting) then it is expensive enough to have car-salesman types wander the floor pressuring people to buy it. Unless these built-in chips talk and engage in high pressure sales tactics (here's a cool one, "please, buy me, or I will be tortured horribly and dumped on the scrap heap!") I don't see the percentages.
As regards things that talk to things after you've bought them; there are merits of doing this with every consumer device that already has a computer chip built into it. However, this is far less of a revolution than when we put computer chips into our cars in the first place, but we weren't thinking about "revolutions" back then so it was just progress.
In order to qualify as a revolution, it has to substantively alter the way we, human beings, live. Internetwork protocol has done this, at least in my case. However, while communicating with city traffic control may vastly alter driving from your car's point of view, it'll make only a slight difference to you, the driver. It's a nice trick but hardly a revolution.
The revolution will come when people talk to machines directly, through TSA (today's sinister accronym, my favorite is DNI, or direct neural interface.)
The next struggle against the intervention-of-big-things-in-our-little-lives will come not when built in chips start monitering our shopping habits - b/c IF YOU DIDN'T BUY IT WITH A CREDIT CARD BIG BROTHER DOESN'T CARE - but when the government tries to restrict my right to have robotic claws, replace my eyes with digital cameras, etc.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
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...
There once was a price tag from Kmart
that had slashdot crying it was too smart
what they didn't know
was the price would be low
when you hacked the WinCE at it's heart
..and when cincinnati.com is on the cutting edge of technology you should be afraid, very afraid!
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.
I don't doubt this. Relevent tech jobs in that frickin' town are sparse. It's a town of salesfolk and chemical engineers, most of which work for GE and P&G. You're either a good bullshitter or you're trying to make a better diaper.
No? Imagine the toaster that can brown your toast to perfection, with no user intervention required. White, whole wheat, rye, thin-sliced, thick-sliced, wheat-thins, leavened or unleavened. The toaster automatically senses what you put in, remembers YOUR idea of perfection (no more arguing with the wife over who left the toaster set to "dark"; it was probably you anyway), and suddenly "burnt to a crisp" becomes something that used to happen to your grandparents.
Now take another step back. Anyone who's ever tried to put together a gourmet meal in his own kitchen can tell you by far the hardest part is the timing -- getting the pheasant under glass, the beef souffle, the Stove Top stuffing -- AND the toast -- all finished at the same time. Now imagine a wired kitchen. Pop the turkey roast in the oven, the frozen veggies in the nuker, the whole wheat in the toaster, and tell your kitchen you want all the accessories to be ready at the same time as the bird. The oven, monitoring the turkey, informs the nuker when there's seven minutes to go so the nuker knows when to start defrosting. At the 45 second mark the toaster kicks in, and 45 seconds later you have a turkey roasted to perfection, veggies steaming hot, and golden brown toast all waiting together. And the whole time you were watching WWF re-runs in the living room. Course, that's not to mention that your oven knows seventy three different ways to roast duck, a hundred and seven ways to bake a cake, and three hundred and twelve ways to broil salmon, all courtesy of your DSL Internet connection. Throw in a two-job, on-the-go family with no time to spend deciphering recipe books, and calling this kind of self-orchestrating, fully-automated kitchen "marketable" would be the understatement of the millenium.
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.
Just the opposite. Imagine a VCR networked with a time server, and that flashing "12:00" goes the way of burned toast (see above). Imagine a VCR that connects to an online database of TV schedules, and you'll never accidentally tape the wrong channel -- or the right channel at the wrong time -- again. Want more? Imagine a VCR that knows you never miss Babylon Five and considerately tapes tonight's episode for you even though you forgot to tell it to do so. Imagine a VCR that automatically adjusts to last minute schedule changes. Imagine a networked VCR that, connecting to an online database, can not only confirm that yes you did see that actress in another movie just last week, but even show you the scene. Imagine stumbling into the middle of an interesting movie on HBO and wishing you'd caught the whole thing. Pas de problem for your VCR -- just tell it to record the next occurance; you don't even need to know when it is. The VCR will inform you when the task is accomplished -- or tell you exactly which local video stores stock it if you just can't wait. Imagine a VCR that monitors your viewing habits so that it can flag upcoming events of potential interest.
Yeah -- I'd buy that VCR.
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.