Should I follow my fridge on Twitter?

Once you read it you'll have this expression. Or think I'm talking bollocks, one or the other.

• “Ed just made toast” @Ed_toaster_314

The internet of things, a term long bandied around in technical circles is rapidly becoming a mainstream concept. This isn’t a new trend, connecting devices and sensors together with human beings is a basic goal of the internet, but the omnipresence of wi-fi and mobile phone bandwidth as well as the rapid strides in low power processor and better battery development has changed the game. According to an Intel survey the number of internet connected devices will increase from around seven billion now to over two hundred billion by 2020. There will be over twenty connected devices for every human being on earth and all of them will be sharing data about their environments, their activities and you, their so called owners. By 2030 some projections indicate there will be over fifty trillion connected devices, in effect; every device/artefact/thingy/widget on earth, from your car and your sunglasses to your front door and your shirt buttons will have the ability to sense their environment, talk with each other and you.

Apart from the simply staggering amounts of data this will create, what will they talk about? The current mode is driven by the “build it and they will come” model adopted by the hardware manufacturers. Add instruments, connections and bandwidth to devices and developers will create applications and platforms which use them in new and innovative ways.

Some applications are obvious, your car telling you and the dealer when there is a problem, your smart meter reporting on your power usage and your fridge managing the weekly shop. There are a host of applications from non-personal devices too, medical scanners reporting seamlessly on patients, road surfaces reporting on loading and traffic volumes, but there are a lot of applications which are a lot less obvious.

• “strewth it’s cold, I’ll put the heating on” @Ed_House_1

It’s already possible for you to use your smart thermostat (like the ones from Nest etc) to act as a crude form of energy trader, starting or delaying the onset of your heating cycle depending on real world conditions and localised predictions rather than simple time/current temperature calculations, combined with time sensitive energy bandings (cheaper at night for example) your thermostat can heat the house for less if it warms up 30 minutes earlier than you get up for example.

It’s a crude form of arbitrage, using real world conditions against pricing models to extract extra value. It sounds like a minor thing but arbitrage is a sure thing, not an investment or guess, it’s a real saving/profit made by exploiting an inefficiency in the market. 

The reason we don’t all use arbitrage models is that they require rapid reaction to rapidly changing conditions and each individual return is quite small. It slides into the “why bother” pool and since 95% of us can’t be bothered to use the techniques we don’t make money on it. The rich do as they have a larger pool of income/wealth and it makes more immediate sense to do it, or to pay someone else to do it for them.

However, simplistic logic problems requiring rapid action and happening thousands of times a year are ripe for automation and this is where the real value of internet of things comes from. All that logic can be expressed using tools like IFTTT.com  and the resultant recipes shared and adapted very easily. Combine that with some way to set tolerances for your IoT device and people can start to make money. Small amounts at first but wealth is simply the accumulation of small savings and profits over a long period of time. Expand which services you are willing to delegate to an IoT digital agent and the sums expand accordingly.

Energy use measurement leads to choice of energy provider, holiday review app to location based fx trading, banking portal leads to real time pension management. Taxi hailing app to management of your self-drive car and pimping it out as a delivery van in it's spare time. Parking app to reselling your booked parking space depending on real time, local need. It might sound a bit far-fetched but it won’t be long until your phone is your bank, your car has a second life as a courier/taxi firm and every single booking/appointment/asset can be resold for profit it profit exists.

This movement has the potential to change the world and make most people a LOT richer.

It’s also one of the reasons that a financial transaction tax should be resisted vehemently; it’s basically anti-democratic, in 20 years time such a tax will prevent you from making money from this sort of capability and keep this sort of model in the hands of the rich. Remember that.

But every magical opportunity comes with an equally capable threat. Just as you can use this explosion in processor power, bandwidth and business logic to make yourself richer, the data trail it leaves can be used against you.

• “More pies for Ed in *this* fridge #WhereAreTheFruitAndVegetables?”  @Ed_Fridge_567

From the data trail your fridge will start to make as it’s used to the pattern of your movement as tracked by your smart smoke detectors, this data ocean will start to become very desirable property for a lot of organisations. From the simple retail offer generators to the more complex reverse arbitrage models of energy usage, the use of sensor/processor/logic/bandwidth to remove more and more inefficiencies from the market will become irresistible.

It might be that my healthcare provider will start flexing my pricing model depending on my diet. Or my electricity company will start to offer me deals if I fix my energy consumption for the next three months, testing my model against theirs and holding my life pattern to ransom against my price per therm. And those are just single sensor driven use cases. 

What about when sensors gang up? What if not all of the sensors are really mine?

• “Just been used for the first time in ages!” @Disposable_lighter_31415926
• “free at last, all hail Mazda!” @Cigarette_packet_12345678910 
•  @Disposable_lighter_31415926 @Cigarette_packet_12345678910 “wow, you guys are really close, I wonder who is making you two happy?” @Ed_Phone_1

When pools of data are combined it becomes easy to drawn second and third order conclusions about what is happening and the underlying reasons for it.  Those conclusions can be for good or ill. It’s possible to use them to support your personal arbitrage model and drive yet more value from your interface with the capitalist system. It’s also possible to use those conclusions to expose the little white lies we all tell and make you accountable for them in terms of increased costs or reduced access to services.  Your car might just trump your phone and prevent you making a call when you are driving in manual mode is just the simplest and most benign example of that I can think of right now. Darker examples around health care access depending on food or insurance models driven by how you walk up stairs are others. 

However just drawing conclusions from your data is still a relatively benign model compared with what can happen if you manipulate the data streams which your IoT agents and models depend upon. You can both game systems for profit and for long term change.  Pricing your heating depending on local pollution levels is one thing. Denying access to power due to your national CO2 contributions is quite another. Informing you of traffic jams enroute is great, re-routing to your dis-advantage you to allow a government official a quicker ride to the airport is very naughty.  Linking your thermostat to your weather centre is useful, gaming the weather centre sensors during manufacture to allow under or over reporting of temperature to make you spend more money on power over decades is bad. Making automatic transactions on interest rates to sweep your bank account each night and make money is very good, delaying the information used to move the money by 15 microseconds and shave 0.0001% off your wealth pool is bad.

The next frontier is just around the corner and there is a lot to think about. Ethics, practical limitations, collaborative pooling, security models and supporting tools all need to be thought about and outside a few science fiction writers like Charles Stross, not enough people seem to be thinking about them at the moment. There is money to be made here people, start looking for ways to make it.

Incidentally, when I circulated this blog post for comment I got the following suggestions for alternative titles;

• ‘My toaster just un-friended me on Facebook’
• ‘Why is my Honda Civic posting selfies on Instagram?
• ‘My vacuum Cleaner just put itself up for sale on eBay’

Make of them what you will, they are all valid possibilities but the last one raised the most comments of them all, can there be emancipation in the internet of things?