The Internet of Things (IoT) is among the buzzwords that are heard everywhere in the tech world. The IoT is being hailed as being among the handful of technologies that can turn our world upside down in the sense that we are going to see everything in the future from a different perspective. How? Simple: changes the IoT can bring about are going to revolutionize our world by making it possible for anything to be connected to something.
What does this mean to you and me? It means that we will live in a world in which nothing ever exists in isolation of anything else. Ever. Consider a scenario where not just your mobile phone or your computers, devise which we normally associate with connectivity, to be connected to each other but one where simply everything will be connected to a central source.
Everything connected to everything else
Imagine your lunch box being connected to that central source. Imagine your utensils, your shoes, your clothing, your vehicle, your spectacles…well, endless items being connected. Why should one do this and what does IoT aim to achieve by doing this, you may ask. Well, that is the story of the changes the IoT can bring about IoT and it is a big story, a story that portends a radical shift in the way humans are going to communicate with each other. That is the possibility that is unfolding before us and which is out to shake our world. Let us examine IoT and the changes it could herald into the future of mankind.
What the Internet of Things can do when it reaches its logical possibility is simply too huge and momentous for our understanding. Like I said, if not a single item on this planet escapes being connected, have you wondered the implications? Let us consider just one of the areas in which changes the IoT can bring about: We are going to have no need for the police, the judiciary, investigations, and everything related to forensics. What am I saying? Yes, if every item on earth is connected and data from it is continuously harnessed and analyzed; what we are left with is a situation in which if someone wants to murder someone, everything from the time the weapon was manufactured to the complete trail of who procured it and used it for what is available.
Imagine the kind of paradigm shift this is going to cause to the investigative agencies! They will be able to overcome the single biggest stumbling block to their present-day work: crime prevention. Investigating after a crime has been committed is one thing, but isn’t prevention everything in this field? An investigation may help them nail down the suspect and the culprit may be brought to book by the legal system. But does that bring back the life of the murdered person?
Isn’t this too mindboggling and baffling to imagine? If this is just one of the areas in which changes the IoT can bring about will work, imagine the way it will transform our world. Due to the changes, the IoT can bring about, will we never have crimes in the future? One cannot rule it out, but that could possibly take a lot of time because for IoT to work in conjunction with other related technologies such as data science, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and others and take human existence to the level where the scenario narrated above is a distinct possibility, it is going to take a few more years, may even decades.
So, till IoT reaches its maximum potential, what all can it do that could change our lives, at the level at which it today is in? Let us examine a few areas in which changes the IoT can bring about can signal the change of a kind we have not been able to visualize till now:
Organizational efficiency
At the micro level, it can bring about changes into a varied number of disciplines in organizations. It can bring about a hell of a number of changes in areas ranging from agriculture to manufacturing and from aviation to healthcare. All these industries will undergo a tectonic transformation when changes the IoT can bring about will enable smart connectivity and make all functions far more efficient than was imaginable.
Business decision making
IoT will help businesses take crucial decisions just like that, at the snap of a finger. Imagine the retail sector. IoT will make it possible to check stock availability in all the organization’s stores, no matter whether these stores are located in Shanghai or in San Diego. With real-time visibility and a highly enhanced supply chain, changes the IoT can bring about will bring down the cost of distribution and drive dealer reputation in multifold ways.
Urban planning
It is now known that urbanization is the next wave for the human populace. A bewildering number of people are migrating to cities the world over: some estimates put the number at anywhere between one and three million a week, which means that we could have the populations of an entire average sized country migrating to cities every year. It is not unrealistic to imagine chaotic and dysfunctional cesspools that cities unprepared for this challenge are likely to become with this kind of influx. It calls for very imaginative ways of dealing with this rush and the attendant pitfalls it brings.
Smart cities, a project that is being much talked about in India, a developing country with a phenomenal problem of badly planned cities, is a direct product of changes the Internet of Things can bring about. It smooths traffic, communication and a host of other utilities such as electricity, water, and many others. This is the kind of change IoT can bring about in urban centers. And, as we know, the changes the IoT can bring about can be replicated across the globe. This is not to suggest that problems and civil issues will be automatically handled at the touch of a button but changes the IoT can bring about will help the agencies deal with these core issues in a much more efficient manner.
About Author:
Sudheer Reddy is a Head of SEO over 6 years working for www.simpliv.com and I am passionate about SEO and content marketing.
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