Thursday, April 6, 2017

Blog 14: How Should Today and Tomorrow Interact?


With chapters 5 and 6 of Samuel’s The Internet of Things, we begin to take a deeper dive into the complications that arrive as a result of adopting this new wave of technology into our daily lives. Though it may seem like a no brainer to adopt these tools so that they become commonplace to future generations, as they mimic what the previous decade predicted the future to be like, there are several social issues that need to be considered before we decide what to advance and what to just leave be. In the past, worries like these were never brought up as the idea of an “Internet of Things”  was considered science fiction. Now that such a thing actually can exist, I think one consideration that is very most important to have moving forward is the worry of how beneficial will smart phones/cars/etc. really be - in other words, could introducing advanced technology actually be a step backwards in comparison to how such things are handled now?


Once again, it’s easy to just say that having a something like a car that can drive itself would be nothing but helpful, but there are several things about how we use our technology that are innately human - things that would be near impossible to program a computer to do. If I may continue using the car example, knowing how to react in a split second situation based on the context of your location and the problem at hand, the ability to communicate with other vehicles when a solution can’t be solved by individual actions (for example, a traffic jam caused due to an accident), and other such scenarios. One way I think this could be handled is by still having a manual option available with the connected version so that in cases where the computer doesn’t know how to resolve the issue, a person can step in and essentially give the machine a “get out of jail free card”.

Another possible solution could be that instead of finding a way to make machines adopt our traits, we could adopt a new format that is custom built for the Internet of Things. For example, if two adjacent cars stop at an intersection at the same time, road laws state that the driver to your right has the right of way, meaning that if you don’t see a driver to your right side, you have the right of way. We could just choose to forget these kinds of old rules and have smart cars handle this by who ever technically reached the intersection first gets to go first. Of course that would entail us having to overcome our species inability to adapt/accept new things, which is never easy.


Questions:

  • Do you think that having more Internet of Things in our lives is worth having to abandon the older way of doing things?
  • Should we have a mix of both Internet of Things and old fashioned tech or is one just overall better than the other?

Image from: https://www.sporcle.com/games/awesomeness365/jetsons-or-flintstones

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