Video: For the future of IoT, keep an eye on 5G and ML
When you hear the bountiful promises of internet of things so poetically uttered by its prospective vendors, like the nice half of a pharmaceutical commercial, your brain is probably receiving two implicit messages. One is that connectivity is a virtue unto itself, like consciousness or the acquisition of a new sense. The other is that connectivity would render devices "smart."[1][2]
Must read: Part one: The biggest switch: 5G and the race to replace the future[3] | Part two: Wiring for wireless: 5G and the tower in your backyard[4] | Part three: Backhand slice: 5G and the surprise for the wireless cloud at the edge[5]
"I think we are going to be surrounded by smart devices," Internet Protocol co-inventor Vint Cerf told a Google-sponsored startups conference[6] four years ago. "There's something really magic, to be able to assume that any device you have that has some programmability in it could be part of a communications network, and could communicate with any other random, programmable device."
A study of any technology over the span of history, for as long as humans have been building machines, will demonstrate quite clearly that it tends to lose its sense of magic, or nirvana, in its implementation. The one quality that 4G wireless[7] had five years ago that it lacks today is that certain "something really magic." What is never so obvious at the outset of a platform's or a system's adoption is that the shedding of false attire is for the better. Technology is, at its root, the systematic extrication of magic from a task. It