Geekly Articles each Day
📜 ⬆️ ⬇️

Go IoT Yourself



40 years before the term “ IoT ” appeared (hereinafter “ Internet of Things ”), in 1968, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote a post-Marxist essay “The System of Things” criticizing (or, rather, explaining a) social phenomenon, which he called “value fetishism” (commodity feitishism). In the additional glossary, later published under the name “ Passwords, ” Baudrillard is interested in “objects” and what transition occurred in the 60s from “production primacy” to “consumption primacy”. Global market changes have brought to the fore the author's attention precisely the “objects”.

Baudrillard is the author of the term “ hyperreality ”, which later developed from the works of the philosopher. According to him, the interest in “objects” has grown from observing how “objects communicate and correlate with each other” - with the help of both the system of “signs” and the syntax that has developed between objects.



According to his observations (made in the sixties), the next era is determined primarily by the seismological shift in lifestyle, which was determined by the transition from the “primary force (action)” to the “primary control”.
')
It sounds complicated, but the basic idea is quite simple.

Compare two words: “shovel” and “keyboard”. Now relate the words “power” and “power” to both concepts. It turns out completely different associative models, is not it?

It is about this that Jean Baudrillard speaks - in his work there is a lot of, both ordinary watches and wrist watches, as well, with the concept of “time”, which are explained as complex, abstract and rather esoteric phenomena.



Is it necessary, after such a preface, to write at all that Jean Baudrillard reflected on the concepts of “time control,” which, in our imagination, is possible with the help of functional products — watches.

According to his thoughts, people wearing a watch fragment time into separate “absorbed” segments, which we get with the help of compulsive action - a glance at the dial.

Again, according to Baudrillard, the wristwatches themselves symbolize the era of “objects” and the “control” mode. Wristwatches contribute to the complication of behavior - any person wearing a watch agrees with this, since “throwing a glance at the arrows” is a habit, which is some evidence of the development of fetishism (according to Marx, “ commodity fetishism ”).

Jean Baudrillard died in 2007, not seeing the dawn of network-connected devices, but you and I are contemporaries of the phenomenon, we see how this hypothesis fills with meaning.


The fiction of the Frenchman is only one of the reasons why at the same time some critics (like Dan Conlon, whose star lit up recently on TechCrunch ) are wondering whether smart watches and devices for a smart home will also be involved in everyday life. like smartphones today, but, ideally, displacing the latter; Theorists see enough examples in history, symbolism and fetishism that prove the power of the idea of ​​wearing something physical for the sake of “feeling control” of something abstract (as in a pair of “watches - time”), or satisfying the abstract, for example, our feelings.



It is in this place that I have to remind the reader that before the start of the Second World War, wrist watches were mainly for the military and privileged sections of society and very quickly turned into an object, which we regard today as “self-evident.” Sometimes to the extent that we forget about them on our own hand. For example, when we check the time on the phone.

Nevertheless - we continue.

2014, in spite of everything, can definitely be called the year of IoT ideas. Starting from the trackers that appeared in a wide assortment and, finally, finally appearing every day devices related to this category of goods.



The reasons why IoT is in an upward trend right now are prosaic:


It is the latter, crowdfunding, that we owe to the majority of devices available on the market today and, to a large extent, from scratch, not from the giants of the industry, “at the same time” developing new markets.

What is most surprising in the current state of affairs related to IoT is the general level of inspiration, which is impossible, except as “going wild”, to be called. At the same time, literally everyone is happy: future businessmen, corporations, consumers, sellers and even the press.

The result of this is the exit of the entire industry into geostationary orbit.

Whether we are ready for this or not is no longer important. The world with amazing speed moves to the direction where absolutely everything will be connected.

There is no “Internet of Things” - there is just the Internet, and our desire to connect every thing we use to it is quite natural. This is the very fetish of “control” that Jean Baudrillard wrote about a long time ago.

Key questions regarding the privacy of the stored data and the security of the systems themselves will only be answered in the future, during the heyday of future infrastructures and market giants.



The generally accepted opinion today is:


Each of these cycles has spawned the giants of the market.

In the first cycle: Google and Amazon

In the second cycle: Facebook and Twitter

At least, it will be presumptuous to assert that the third cycle will also generate such companies. However, this is exactly what we are seeing at present.

If in doubt, here is a good example:


I think that you have already understood what exactly is shown in this illustration - all the companies one way or another connected with the IoT sector. What is interesting here:


If “smart cities” are put on a par with the above factors, very serious recent advances in robotics, connecting cars, air equipment (drones, nano-satellites) to the network, then anyone who still has a fantasy can imagine what all this can lead to and most likely will result in reality.

Fortunately, all these "toys" us wildly rod , which means we are ready to pay for them.



So we got to Dan Conlon, who published the sensational article in TechCrunch . Start a conversation about it with a simple check of the facts:


And yet - Dan interesting sets out.

Light bulbs, washing machines, refrigerators, door locks - if we believe the manufacturers of modern gadgets, all these devices strictly need access to the Internet, as well as to our personal data.

But there are problems.

Philips Hue is one of the good examples of how beautiful, and expensive, technology actually is retrograde (facing backwards in time). Turn on the light in the bathroom? Simply simple: find a mobile phone, unlock the screen, find the application, turn on the light. Instead of one fleeting pressure on the physical switch, a whole quest appears, consisting of several actions.

This nonsense even led to the need for the appearance of an additional application - Tap , which emulates simple physical switches.

Technologies of “smart home”, created or created in the future, should learn to coexist with already existing interfaces, and not try to replace them with untested, and sometimes unjustified.

Making yourself a coffee by pressing a button on your phone is an attractive idea. Pressed, came - coffee is ready. It looks unattractive when the coffee maker is turned off from the mains (which, by the way, is not at all silly).

It is not surprising that in this situation, Belkin releases the “smart” WeMo sockets in order to solve this existing problem, in their opinion. That is, in order to make coffee, we already need not only a smart coffee maker, but also a smart outlet. But I just wanted to drink morning coffee ...

If it seemed to you that the smartphone is a universal remote control, which will only get better if you can control the conditional “everything” from it, you should think again.

All of these WeMo, Hue, Nest, Withings and August, as well as other applications that, supposedly, are designed to “improve and simplify” my life, collectively threaten to make it completely unbearable. Simply closing the door and turning off the light in the house turns into a task that it never had. And should not be. This is not clever, this is stupid, according to Conlon.

What is really needed for a house to become “smart” is to adapt to its owner, and not to force him to take additional actions. Mobile apps for smart gadgets should look more like dashboards than administrative interfaces.

SmartThings, purchased by Samsung, do more than other companies in order to tie protocols and devices into one node, but God forbid you to become one of the disgruntled customers who grumble on the forum.

Apple's HomeKit is aimed at a general painkiller by grouping gadgets by room or “zone”. But much remains unexplained before the official release, scheduled for early 2015, in particular - voice control via Siri.

In general, Conlon writes, many agree with his arguments, including among the creators of “smart” devices. Nevertheless, the entry into the market of each of them is still accompanied by ignoring simple models of human behavior.

For example, you can take geolocation, which today is not used except by sellers of toilet paper (probably not for long). On the one hand, it is reasonable to turn on the heating and light in the house where the user is at the moment, or where he is passing at a given frequency. On the other hand, the whole system stops working when the user exits the house where someone is: with his phone, his wife, children, animals.



No one, so far, has learned to work with several "inhabitants" of the object, and this is frustrating.

In general, the collapse of the buyer and, in the future, the user of intelligent systems with technologies that are not fully developed, and often, working at half their potential, is a reality for the 2014 IoT sample.

In the end, I have three stories on the subject.

The first is the creation of the Intel IoT Platform.


Attempt to the largest manufacturer of silicon semiconductors to enter this market. Despite the fact that Qualcomm also has the AllJoyn protocol, it is open and transferred to the Linux Foundation, Intel was the first to seriously consider security issues in IoT .

There is nothing to hide here - Intel “missed” the mobile revolution, having no time for the table at all. This is one of the reasons why now, like many other large corporations, he is trying to catch up with the wave of connected devices. Instead of producing these devices independently, Intel has concluded several partnership agreements and has already connected devices from its friendly companies to its platform.

The promise of Intel is simple and straightforward - the company produces chips and sensors, as well as tools for collecting and analyzing data from them, which will help to make devices “above” the platform provided. Naturally, the company is interested in the fact that the manufacturers of actual devices use both (chips), and other (sensors), and the third (analytics). Such a “serial desire” is not the first for the company, but perhaps for the first time it says that it created all the building blocks so that others could effectively do their job and sell the product.

Already there is a special microchip for micro-devices - Intel absorbed Basis Science, the creators of the Basis fitness tracker, after the formation of a special team “New Devices” under the leadership of the former top manager of Apple and Palm Mike Bell.

Intel has calculated that by 2020, there will be more than 50 billion network-connected devices in the world, from individual to corporate. Naturally, we would all put aside the brick if Intel was going to make user devices by itself - it is already planned to expand the platform to medical devices (swallow pills), wind power generators and machine tools at factories.

This is not to mention the console, cars, and smart home systems.

In cooperation with Siemens, a parking system is being developed, with NCR - connected sales points and energy efficiency monitoring in hotels and rental housing.



The second is OpenSensors.io


An excellent example of what will happen to all “smart” devices connected to the network in the near future.

Yodi Stanton, the creator of the service, has her own story - her eldest daughter was diagnosed with asthma last March, after which the caring mother decided to find out the cause of her daughter's illness and installed air pollution sensors around her home in London. She was just wondering if there was a connection between the disease and the number of foreign particles in the air over the city.

Unfortunately, the correlation could not be found, but we managed to build a very unusual system - OpenSensors resembles Twitter for connected sensors of any kind.

You simply load the data stream from your own devices or, virtually, from any source and give it to the OpenSensors servers. Or subscribe to other users' data streams in order to perform research or write a functional application, perhaps even create a device.

These are real Big Data, in the form in which they can exist already today among us, with the help of those devices that we own or will own in the near future.

Other projects, such as Dat, Octoblue (formerly SkyNet), Zetta - they all try to exchange data between devices, and this is their main difference. OpenSensors wants to become a central hub, where each device delivers its own data, then distributing it among everyone. Using the standard MQTT protocol, the platform collects data and distributes it among the “subscribers”.

Since the product is open, anyone can run OpenSensors on their server, in a situation if you don’t want to share your own data. You can either pay for an individual account on the platform, or even build your own, individual, “sensor networks” - this is how the whole product is monetized.

OpenSensors already solves immediate problems. The two largest examples of the platform’s operation are the use and analysis of data on water levels in Oxford rivers for flood forecasting, and the largest is the partnership with 12 cities in the UK for collecting real-time city parking data.



The third one is for everyone to think, and therefore the paragraph is simply copied from Wikipedia.


In the film “ The Matrix ”, Neo gets a computer disc from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. This book is a popular critical theory, trying to explain where the "reality" and where, in fact, "Simulation and simulation." Thus, he uses the book itself as a simulation, hiding the content - a cache with disks containing forbidden data. When Neo gets the disc hidden there from the book, he opens it in the chapter “On Nihilism”. In the first approximation, nihilism is a philosophical point of view, which is a negation of generally accepted values: ideals , moral norms, culture, and forms of social life.

In preparing the material used the work of the guys on the salary from: TechCrunch , The Verge , Wired Magazine

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/364855/

More articles:


All Articles