It's the IBM tagline, but I think that most of us really do want a "smarter planet." That's kind of what we do in technology; building systems that are smarter. The systems might work more intelligently on their own, doing things like balancing out loads, performing scheduling, or something similar. Or the systems might help us to work more intelligently, perhaps finding bugs for us, making it easy for us to perform some task, or even presenting information in a way that we can use to make decisions.
I was watching this video from IBM about the Internet of Things. It's embedded on this page along with Tim O'Reilly's keynote (both worth watching). I've seen talks like this before, talking about a world where we have more and more "smart" sensors out there that will help us to live our lives more efficiently by using the data they collect. I don't know how close we'll get, but not because of the complexity of software. Look at Google Goggles and other similar types of correlation software that come up with some amazing results. Instead I think we might not get such a world because so many of us use a variety of software from different companies, almost none of which will be willing to share this data between the pieces of software.
I think we can build smarter planet, but it requires deep integration of the data, that ability to mine data for patterns, correlations, etc., and I'm not sure it's something that is easily done through API access. I think more it means that we need quite a few CPU cycles crunching a large variety of data on a constant basis that we're accumulating. We need a real personal assistant that's built in software and has access to lots of our data, which is stored in lots of pieces of software.
I think someone stuck in a Google world, with Gmail, Google Calendar, an Android phone, Google Apps, etc. is the closest, but they are trusting a lot of their data to Google, stored on GFS file systems and processed on Google's servers. Who's to say that Google won't want to sell some of the analysis or results at some point to someone looking to market to you? Or there won't be another bug that discloses or mixes some of this data up?
I like the idea of smarter software around that can help me. I just am not sure that we are building it in a way that respects us as individuals.
Steve Jones
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