IoT Inside of Me

Would you eat an IoT device if your airline told you to? Sure, we already put some fairly questionable things inside of our bodies on airplanes whenever we peel back the plastic wrap on those in-flight meals, but how much do you really trust your airline? British Airways (BA) made some buzz this past week…

Internet of Weapons: Connecting to Save Lives

Munich, Orlando, Paris, Fort Myers, Hesston, Dallas, San Bernardino, Newtown, Oslo… the list reads like a failure of modern society. And at the center of all of these tragedies lies a single, simple word: guns. Few topics raise such controversy or debate and, while I definitely have my opinions on the matter, I also accept…

Let’s Get Phygital: IoT = IRL + URL

Around two years ago, I worked on a project on the future of play for a toy company (yes, this is my actual job). Leading into that project, I recall really pushing a hypothesis I had been playing with about the concept of “phygital.” At the time, I was reading a lot of Sterling (and…

The Internet of Flesh

I recently reposted an article I wrote a couple of years back about the concept of Biobotics: biologically-based automated machines. At the time of writing, I was thinking a lot about the denial of metal and electronics as the only building blocks for the robotic world. The concept made perfect sense; so many of our…

The Internet of Paperweights: Keeping IoT Alive

Alphabet, Google’s parent holding company, recently announced that one of the smart thermostat companies they acquired, Revolv (not Nest), would be closing up shop and shutting down their servers on May 15, effectively rendering the Revolv to be nothing more than an ugly, overpriced piece of technologized wall-art. Though this news broke at the start…

Securing Things

As the promise and scale of IoT continues to be fulfilled, interesting implications – and business opportunities – creep out of the woodwork. Any proposition to create exponential growth in the number of active IP addresses in the world will also give rise to a new potential security disaster. Since a requirement of these Things…

Creating Smart Assholes

Just because you made a machine “smart” doesn’t mean you made it intelligent. Smart homes, IoT, AI, ubicomp, robotics, ambient media, pervasive computing – all are words that in one form or another describe our attempt to embed digital intelligence into the otherwise dumb, lifeless devices around us. However, as we engineers so often do,…