Toy Story won the hearts of audiences by bringing to life the imaginary world we inhabited as children, one in which our treasured dolls and action figures were living beings with human traits.
Yet little did the creative geniuses at Pixar know that, in depicting this on the silver screen, they were also predicting the future.
Some 20 years on from the movie’s release, not only do children have the possibility of developing interactive relationships with their toys, but those toys can also have conversations with one another.
The toy manufacturer CogniToys, for instance, has developed an educational dinosaur that learns alongside it owner by connecting wirelessly to IBM’s supercomputer Watson.
The modern-day Barbie, meanwhile, is equipped with speech recognition technology that enables the doll to converse with her human playmates as well as other web-enabled plastic figures.
Smart toys are however just a dot in a vast and expanding universe of wirelessly connected devices – one that is more commonly known as the Internet of Things (IoT).
Thanks to advances in computing power and data storage, cities worldwide are lit up by web-enabled streetlights that turn on and off as pedestrians stroll past, patients can be assessed remotely by their doctors while babies’ breathing patterns, temperature and body positions can monitored in real time by smart sensors.
Heavy industry is also becoming a major part of the IoT, with researchers predicting the factory floor will soon be teeming with a new breed of robots whose every move is monitored and controlled by humans in offices that are often hundreds of miles away. Currently, there are roughly 5 billion devices connected to the web. Yet according to the IT consultancy Gartner, that figure will balloon to 25 billion in less than five years.
A world brimming with internet-connected devices could be a better one in many ways. Industrial processes should become more efficient – providing a much-needed boost to productivity – while being able to carry out chores remotely rather than physically promises to make people’s daily lives that bit easier. The IoT could, the consultant Accenture says, add as much as USD14.2 trillion to the total GDP of the world’s largest 20 economies.
But a wirelessly-enabled world is no utopia. Uninhibited and unregulated, the IoT could represent a major threat to personal security. An internet-connected coffee maker can give burglars useful information about when its user gets up in the morning, while smart washing machines and tumble dryers can provide clues as to when a home is empty. Even more unsettling, hackers have been able to transform internet-enabled televisions into spying devices, monitoring a householder’s every move.
Web-linked health devices, meanwhile, present an entirely different level of risk. The former US Vice President Dick Cheney had security systems embedded into his wireless heart monitor for fear it could be used to mount an assassination attempt.
Yet crime – cyber or otherwise – is not the only harmful IoT by-product. Personal privacy is also under threat as internet connected world provides governments and corporations with a vast ocean of information on individuals’ activities.
“You can choose not to go on Facebook and not to have a mobile phone. It may be a bit inconvenient but it’s a possibility.”
“You can choose not to go on Facebook and not to have a mobile phone. It may be a bit inconvenient, but it’s a possibility,” explains Mirkko Presser, head of research and innovation for the Smart City Lab at Denmark’s Alexandra Institute.
“However, if you are watched by a CCTV camera or a sensor, you automatically become part of the IoT, and it can easily be abused or change the way we live as a society. Surveillance is already a huge part of our society.”
Some worry that car insurance firms can now use the data provided by web-enabled cars to score policyholders on their driving skills. A poor score could feasibly be used to justify a hike in insurance premiums or, at worst, serve as reason to deny someone insurance. The data provided by health apps could be used in a similar way by health insurance companies.
It is the IoT’s potential for exploitation by both governments and big corporations that is making civil liberties groups nervous.
Philip N. Howard, professor of technology and international relations at the University of Washington and author of the book Pax Tecnica, describes the IoT as the most powerful tool for social control that ever existed, more potent, even, than the viaducts that enabled ancient Rome to build and sustain its vast empire.
“[National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward] Snowden has taught us so much about how surveillance and censorship work, and it is very likely that the next IoT will be an important tool for social control,“ he explains. ”We are at a very sensitive moment, where some big decisions are being made that will have a serious impact on our political life, and most people don’t know about this.”
But it doesn’t have to be that way, Howard says.
With the standards and protocols for the Internet still being negotiated, there is an opportunity to build an IoT that reinforces the freedom of the individual and creates the conditions under which the world’s citizens can get together to solve global problems.
One solution would be to set aside a certain portion of the IoT for activities which serve the common good. This “technology tithe” – that one tenth of the IoT’s data storage, processing time or bandwidth – would be reserved for entities such as health organisations, academic institutions and non-governmental organisations. Allied to this, consumers could donate 10 or 20 per cent of the data collected on their activities to groups they would like to support, such as hospitals or charities.
As Howard explains: “We are going to have so much data about our behaviour that we will have the opportunity to make decent political decisions.”
