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This
ain’t your daddy’s world wide web. If
you thought that Web 2.0 was mind blowing, wait until you see what’s
coming. Where Web 2.0 turned an online
research tool into a global social phenomenon that redefined how we interact
with one another, Web 3.0 promises to take us where no web surfer has gone
before. That’s chiefly due to the fact
that the next generation of online technology will be AI enabled and able to
deliver more information faster and in more ways than is now possible. If you want to see what Web 3.0 has in store
for you in the not too distant future, buckle up as I give you a sneak preview
in this week’s blog.
Skynet is REAL!
If
you watched the recently released Terminator Genisys movie, the story’s central
theme was the 2017 release of a global operating system that promises to link
all computing devices. This artificially
intelligent system, whose core is protected in a subterranean vault, is set to
launch Armageddon once it comes online, since it will be wired into everything
with a processor, including military hardware.
The movie’s plot revolves around destroying the Cyberdyne mainframe before
Genisys comes online.
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To
understand where the web is going, you have to understand where it has been. Back
in the 90’s, the Internet was nothing like what we have come to know and love
today. Connections back then were via
dialup that was so slow that not only was streaming video an impossibility,
even graphics were scant since they slowed the time it took a homepage to load
to a snail’s crawl. Search engines prior
to 2000 were plentiful, but rudimentary lists designed to help web users
navigate a network composed of a couple million sites. (Today 250,000 websites are routinely added
to the Internet on a daily basis.)
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Rise of the Machines
Today,
everything from our cellphones to our appliances and automobiles are web
enabled. This has created what is
referred to as the “Internet of things” otherwise known as IoT. Like Skynet, the IoT is into everything. A quote from a blog I wrote 2 years ago called,
“Is The Internet of Everything Really,
Everything They're Cracking It Up to Be? “sums it up quite nicely,
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While the term was only coined in 1999, the concept for the IoT
has been around since the 1960’s. It was
in 1962 that a researcher working for DARPA by the name of John Licklider
described his vision of a galactic network where everything could talk to
everything. (Sound familiar?) Licklider went even further by positing that
by employing interconnected machines, mankind would eventually be able to
improve our world experience without having to get involved. While Lick’s vision went on to be the nucleus
for the ARPANET, even he would have been surprised by recent developments in
machine intelligence and robotics that have created virtual digital assistants,
wearable computers and autonomous vehicles.
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More importantly, he could not possibly have envisioned the birth
of an industry that has spawned legions of web enabled machines that already
outnumber us. Take for instance the fact
that in 2003 there were 6.3 billion people on the planet and roughly 500
million devices connected to the Internet. (From the 2011 report by Cisco entitled,
“The Internet of Things – How the Next Evolution of the Internet is Changing
Everything.”)
Explosive growth of
smartphones and tablet PCs brought the number of devices connected to the
Internet to 12.5 billion in 2010, while the world’s human population increased
to 6.8 billion, making the number of connected devices per person more than 1
(1.84 to be exact) for the first time in history.
Bear in mind that this report is five years old and that when it
was written, the iPhone had only been introduced 4 years previously. The report goes on to predict that the ratio
of connected devices to people would continue to escalate to 3.6 per person by
2015 to 6.5 by 2020 and the conclusion is obvious. Just as teenagers today would not know what
to do if texting and social networks were suddenly to disappear overnight, so
too will society’s dependence on smart devices become ever more ingrained. Just as the youth of my generation rallied
around the cry of “I want my MTV,” will the cry of millennials and their
progeny rally around the theme of “I want my IoT ?” More importantly, will the next generation,
whose life will start, stop and revolve around a wired world from cradle to
grave and whose lives will be tracked, programmed and computed by a
technological trove of IoT devices that do everything from order their
groceries to drive their cars be better or worse off in the long run? Will the very technology that connects
everyone and everything to each other help or hurt our evolution? Or, will it prove to be our Achilles’ Heel as
everyone from nation states and hacking collectives to our own government uses
the IoT to control a population that can no longer exist without technology?
The
Semantics of Web 3.0
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In a glimpse of things to come, Amazon recently debuted t
liste ns and learns. Equipped with a
female virtual assistant named Alexa, this device is much more than a music
director. Capable of hearing you from
across the room, even with the music playing, Alexa will answer questions, read
Audiobooks to you, report on the news, traffic and weather, provide information
on business and sports, tell jokes, control lights and switches in your home,
as well as ordering you a pizza or Uber.
As more apps become available, Echo will become even more useful. At $180.00 Echo is affordable to the
masses.
Watch this short Demo video of echo.
As Echo and other artificially intelligent devices make their way
onto the shelves and into our homes, they like smartphones will soon become
something that we can’t do without. The
lure of convenience has always been something that is irresistible to most
humans.
As to whether the very machines that today knit our global
community together will one day rise up to bite the hand that feeds them is a
story for another day. To quote Arnold
Schwarzenegger, all I have to say is, “I’ll be Back.”
In this
article I have discussed how we are entering the age of Web 3.0 and how it will
affect our use and interaction with the Internet of Things. This article
explores the difference between web 2.0 and 3.0 and how the new AI paradigm
will affect human usage of IoT devices, its growth, effects on quality of life,
safety, privacy and the long term survival of our species.
If you
found this article useful please share it with your friends, family and
co-workers. If you
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Carl Weiss is president of WorkingtheWebtoWin.com a digital marketing agency in Jacksonville, Florida that routinely works with bloggers and other online marketers to grow their businesses.
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Carl Weiss is president of WorkingtheWebtoWin.com a digital marketing agency in Jacksonville, Florida that routinely works with bloggers and other online marketers to grow their businesses.
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Weird! Wild! Wacky! And, apparently, there's much more to come. Thanks for putting the information out there.
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