{"id":12941,"date":"2019-09-09T11:11:31","date_gmt":"2019-09-09T16:11:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therealdaily.com\/?p=12941"},"modified":"2019-09-09T11:27:33","modified_gmt":"2019-09-09T16:27:33","slug":"internet-of-things-risks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/editorials\/internet-of-things-risks\/","title":{"rendered":"A hugely dangerous challenge of the Internet of Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, robot apocalypse. The Internet of Things machines have their cold metal fingers all up in our data, our houses<\/a>, our sand dunes and\/or porn<\/a>. <\/p>\n

And for what? What do they offer in exchange for this unprecedented invasion of our day to day lives? <\/p>\n

Seamless, user-friendly automation to help with a thousand daily tasks, demonstrably improving our quality of life.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s\u2026 that’s actually a pretty good offer! Nice work, robots.<\/p>\n

It comes with catches, and we\u2019ve covered those<\/a>, but Day One bumps and blunders are part of owning tech. They generally get engineered out.<\/em><\/p>\n

What I want to talk about is Day 100, or 1000. Because the important word in \u201cInternet of Things\u201d isn\u2019t \u201cInternet.\u201d We have the Internet. We can confidently expect the Internet to continue being a big deal.<\/p>\n

But \u201cthings\u201d is an important word. Things are distinct from tech. With tech, buying the thing and futzing with the thing are part of the fun, especially for practicing nerds like your narrator. Tech is new, and the excitement of a new game or a new phone can take the edge off, say, a server crash or a quick trip to tech support and back.<\/p>\n

What about things? No early adopter aura in history will get a customer to ignore a fridge full of rotten food. Fridges need to work, period. So does your thermostat and your car. All those things are charter candidates for the full IoT overhaul, and they\u2019re all capital T Things, not tech. They aren\u2019t shiny toys people can live without for a week or four. They\u2019re expected parts of daily life, things that need to work on Day 1, 100, and 1000. <\/p>\n

Are companies preparing for that? Are the startups rising out of the blue-light-white-plastic Stuff Renaissance prepared to rebrand as global service providers, doing the hard, unglamorous, absolutely necessary work of digital maintenance? <\/p>\n

Bigger question: are they prepared to guarantee security while they do so? Because anything with digitized bits needs patches and updates to function, and if it can download patches and updates, it can download things that are not patches and updates<\/em>. No one wants to chase a botnet out of their microwave. Are the companies invested in always-on Things standing up and saying they\u2019ll take responsibility for indefinitely securing and maintaining the infrastructure they intend to profit from?<\/p>\n

Short answer, no. They\u2019re not. Operations departments tend to be vanishingly small, painfully understaffed, spectacularly underpaid. Let\u2019s be real,: we don\u2019t prioritize stuff like that. We\u2019re talking the digital equivalent of the guy who chases the raccoons out of your HVAC, and that sounds entirely too much like work. <\/p>\n

Maintenance is not sexy. <\/p>\n

But it\u2019s absolutely necessary. It\u2019s generally just the beginning of a thing. It gets the wheel rolling, and that\u2019s not to be undersold. <\/p>\n

But the IoT wheel is most definitely rolling. The issue is keeping it in motion, making it a wifi-level universal usage standard, not a 3DTV fad. <\/p>\n

That won\u2019t get done in a meeting. That gets done through long term adoption, and long term adoption will be about attracting, training, and retaining people willing to do the hard work of maintenance and customer support.<\/p>\n

The Internet of Things wants to be a major step forward in the infrastructure of daily life. I am incredibly in favor of that. But daily life works because it\u2019s the full time job of a whole lot of people to make sure it does so. So to Internet of Things companies, I say – pay them, treat them well, make your organization the best place in the industry for them, or be left behind by the people who do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(EDITORIAL) The Internet of Things is here, with all manner of soft AI voices and shiny Bluetooth bits. But how long can we count on it staying?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":337683,"featured_media":10317,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[254],"tags":[634,1234,455],"class_list":["post-12941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorials","tag-internet-of-things","tag-real-estate-news","tag-tech"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2017\/01\/lg-alexa.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/337683"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12941"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14331,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12941\/revisions\/14331"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}