BROADCASTS.com

Welcome to Day 1428 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomSensors and The Internet of Things – Ask GrampsWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1428 of our Trek, and our focus on Fridays is the future technological and societal advances, so we call it Futuristic Fridays. My personality is one that has always been very future-oriented. Since my childhood, I have yearned for the exploration and discovery of new technologies and advancements for the future. I grew up with the original Star Trek series, and even today, while I am on my 64th revolution around the sun, I still dream of traveling in space. Each week we will explore rapidly converging technologies and advancements, which will radically change our lives. At times, the topics may sound like something out of a science fiction novel, but each area that we explore is already well on its way of becoming a reality over the next couple of decades.


To keep with our theme of “Ask Gramps,” I will put our weekly topics in the form of a question to get us on track. So this week’s question is: Hey Gramps, I am starting to hear about sensors and the Internet of Things. What does this refer to, and how will it change our future? 


Sensors and the Internet of ThingsLast week on Futuristic Friday, we explored Smart Cities and how life, especially in cities, will be changing radically over the next couple of decades. Our world is in a disruptive mode, which will speed up the exponential technology that is changing our world today. I am using some of the information mentioned in Peter Diamandis’s blogs and book “The Future is Faster Than You Think.”, as a starting point.


Sensor ProliferationSensors will not only transform healthcare and diagnostics. Any electronic device that measures a physical, quantitative value—light, acceleration, temperature, then sends that information to other devices on a network, qualifies as a sensor. Sensors add intelligence to our appliances. But more importantly, they add hours to our lives.


Consider that in less than a decade, when you run out of coffee, your kitchen cabinet will detect a shortage (cross-referencing sensor data with your coffee-drinking habits) and order more. A blockchain-enabled smart contract will subsequently place an order, triggering an Amazon drone delivery directly to your doorstep.


If we extend this scenario further, let’s imagine that you have your very own Butler-bot who could soon transport these freshly ground beans from delivery box to cabinet, sparing you the trouble.


If advances in computing power, AI, and high-speed global networks represent the center mass of the digital revolution, then today’s sensor uprising is the outer edge of that revolt.


If we consider the first part of tomorrow’s smart environment information-processing pipeline, sensors are the data-gathering apparatus that provide our computers with the information they need to act.


Connected Devices and IoTWe are in the middle of a sensor revolution. The street name for this uprising is the “Internet of Things,” the vast mesh network of interconnected smart devices that will soon span the globe. Let’s back up a little because it’s worth tracing the evolution of this revolution to understand how far we’ve come.


Just 31 years ago, in 1989, John Romkey, one of the inventors of the transmission control protocol (TCP/IP), connected a Sunbeam toaster to the Internet, making it the very first IoT device.


Ten years later,...