Near the end of a long ride back picking up her daughter from college, Eleanor McKay was having trouble keeping her eyes open. She never saw the black Cadillac Escalade a drunken teenager was racing through her blind spot.
A collision at 65 mph on the Merritt Parkway nearly always ends tragically. Fortunately, this one never happened.
When Eleanor started to make what would have been a tragic lane change, her car was ready. An alarm went off to warn her, and Eleanor never pulled into the Cadillac’s lane, never put her daughter in the path of a 5,800-pound monster SUV, never experienced tragic loss that night.
Her car’s collision avoidance warning saved them, and it was enough to persuade Eleanor to pull off the highway and take a break. She and her daughter arrived home safely, thanks to a sensor.
Sensors are spreading rapidly around our planet, despite the bad economy, and despite a prevailing sense of gloom. Why does the future seem so bleak, despite so much innovation all around us?
We are right up against the end of a system that stood us well for a century, but whose usefulness has faded away. That is the mass production system, which inherently is a zero-sum game. Someone wins, and lots of others lose. In this system, that’s the way it has to be. Someone always loses.
Mass production is inflexible and wasteful, but it’s also predictable. This is because mass production sets the agenda, not millions or billions of individuals. Mass production is the worst possible model to use in a world in which every individual wants meaningful choices and has access to individualized news, entertainment and social interactions.
The alternative is a personal economy, in which information is the most valuable currency, much more so that physical goods. In such an economy, getting precisely what you want is much more important than getting a cheap price on what some manufacturer decided you should buy.
Of course, politicians and bond fund investors don’t think very much about mass production versus individualization. Plus, they have a vested interest in the old system. They will be the last to see, understand and accept the transition that has already begun. They will give in only when they have no choice.
We are very close to that moment, when they have no choice.
Good news, and more good news
Do not believe the gloom and doom. Do not believe that we are leaving our children a world of poverty and despair. The opposite is true. We are leaving them a world of magical possibilities, in which truth and justice prevail.
I can summarize the reason for this in a single word: sensors.
Trillions and trillions of sensors.
Smartphones and tablets seem to be everywhere. Gartner predicts over 63 million tablets will be sold in 2011. But sensors dwarf the numbers of phones and tablets.
Sensors are in every smartphone and tablet, but they also are in cars, appliances, houses, office buildings, roads, bridge, lights, shorelines and across our oceans. They orbit in space and are buried in the ground. They are getting smaller, cheaper and more capable.
The spread of sensors will provide incredible volumes of data that computers can then turn into useful, actionable knowledge. If a tree falls in the forest, we’ll know it. If the sky darkens, we’ll know why.
The way things really are, instead of the way we thought they were
Throughout history, the ways that things work have perplexed humanity. Our ancestors couldn’t communicate over long distances, couldn’t transport fresh food from one continent to another, and couldn’t track storms in real time.
Today, I can watch a thunderstorm develop two towns away from mine and bring the dogs inside just minutes before it starts to pour. We eat fresh oranges in the winter, and chat online with people who live on the other side of the world.
In every discipline, human knowledge is advancing, often at startling speed. We still have a great deal to learn; the quest for knowledge will never end. But we know more, and are learning faster than ever before.
Human senses, turbocharged
As computers have migrated from our desktops to our phones and tablets, an even more impactful change has gone largely unnoticed. That is the spread of sensors across our planet. Cameras, microphones, GPS units, thermometers, heart rate monitors, radar, and countless other sensors are everywhere. Many are so small as to be nearly invisible.
Sensors will change nearly everything about the way we live and work, in part because they will reveal the truth in a manner that makes it inescapable.
- If you drive from Boston to New York in less than three hours and 45 minutes, you were speeding.
- If your college girlfriend is photographed in the front seat of your car at 3:02 p.m. on a weekday, you are either cheating on your wife or lying to her… or at least that will be her reaction when the traffic photo is mailed to your house.
- If changing three displays at the front of a store causes shoppers to stay in the store longer and to buy 21% more products, sensors will notice the changes and prove the new strategy works.
Revealing the truth, instead of spinning it
Sensors will change the way that companies communicate with customers, and the way politicians interact with constituents.
Until now, marketing has been largely about messaging, branding, helping to create a sales funnel, closing sales, and pushing products. Many argue that marketing is the art and science of persuasion. Just look at Coke vs. Pepsi, a battle between two giant corporations each of whom attempts to mislead consumers that drinking sugared water says something important about who and what they are.
Marketing will soon be about making the truth clear and obvious, instead of about spinning the truth to make your product look better than it is. There will be too many sensors to have it any other way.
Marketing will be about designing smart products and services, instead of pushing dumb ones.
Imagine if in the 1950′s radio had been replaced not by small black and white televisions, but instead by the Web, Google and Facebook. Would 1950′s marketers have been ready? No way. But that’s how big a change is almost here, and the reason is the quickening spread of trillions of sensors.
Intelligence depends on senses
When you add senses to an object, and you connect those sensory inputs to any ability to react, you create something that can act smart.
Everything – from your toaster to your trousers – will soon act smart. This is because everything will have sensors designed into it. The only reason not to do this is cost, and the cost of sensors is declining rapidly, as are their size and power requirements.
Sensors will change every industry. They will force most companies to change the services they offer and the way they do business.
Why? Because dumb objects can’t compete with smart ones, and dumb companies can’t compete with smart ones either.
Sensors will change the world more than the PC revolution changed our lives, because sensors can go everywhere people go, plus they can go everywhere we can’t: deep in the oceans, high in the skies, inside our bodies, and across civilization’s infrastructure.
Sensors are not a panacea, but they will create a tipping point
Take a mixed up world, add sensors, and everything will be okay? Is it really that simple?
No.
But sensors will at last shift the balance and create a massive tipping point between the economic systems of the Industrial Revolution and that of the Information Age. This is an enormous change, and because most did not see it coming, it is a wrenching change. But it is not the end of humanity, or prosperity.
It is the beginning of sustainable, compassionate prosperity. It is the reboot of a world to a time in which loyalty is rooted in common sense and logic.
Ignorance will not disappear overnight, or without a struggle. Misguided decisions will not disappear easily. But their days are numbered, and that is very good news for us all.
