Welcome to the programmable world

At home, in the car, in the factory, we are surrounded by small smart devices that capture every move in our lives. Now, they start talking to each other, and soon we can direct them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, and even save our lives.

Car door: Temperature, +13.0℃ battery, 2.4V

Home Lighting: 2001-

Kitchen Table Lighting: 2001-

Thermostat: 4301-

Coffee Pot: 2001-

Bedroom motion sensor: device 0xb247 interval status 0x0031

The following is the language of the future: Coffee pot to the timekeeping device has said, thermoelectric coupling to the action sensor has said that the factory machine to the grid and a box of raw materials have to say. After 10 years of WiFi technology connecting a computer to a wireless network, five years after the smartphone solution put a series of pocket devices into the Smart device network, the dawn of a new era has come to our eyes-the most common thing in life is to talk to each other in a wireless way, Perform tasks as required and provide us with unprecedented information.

Let's imagine a factory like this: Each machine, each operation room sends out the feedback information, in order to solve the problem on the production line; Let's imagine a hotel where lights, stereos, shutters can be controlled not only by a central control station, but also by the way you want to adjust before you enter the room. , let's imagine a gym: once you get here, the fitness machine will know your fitness arrangements ...

There is a better term to describe the future we are building: the programmable world. After all, in such a future, the compelling is neither the sensor itself nor the state of sensors, objects, and devices that are connected to each other. The fact is that once we have enough objects in the network, they are no longer a one-off novelty or a source of data, but rather form a coordinated system that becomes a large, ingenuity complex, becoming the main body of a subject. It will become the "Internet" of the stereo-the term "internet" means the point-to-point system (even in front of this cloud age, the same is true of the app age and the walled garden era, but the future interconnect will be more like a beehive, a distributed Droid Corps, widely distributed and sometimes invisible, But it seems to be as coordinated as the same large machine.

To give full play to the potential of the programmable world, we need to go through three stages.

Phase one: Get more devices into the network, including more sensors and processors, and more wireless connectors that collect data from existing processors.

Phase two: Let these devices depend on each other, coordinate with each other and accomplish simple tasks from human intervention.

Phase three: The devices are all over the place, so they are understood as a programmable system, a real platform that can run software like a computer and a smartphone. Upon reaching this final stage, the system can transform everyday objects into a design environment, a paradise for programmers and engineers. It will allow us to rethink the difference between the virtual world and the real world. This may sound like a scary technology intrusion, but the programmable world does allow us to say goodbye to more gadgets, to automate the work that is usually done by hand, and to let intelligence fall from the cloud to our side.

Obviously, there are some troughs in the future of this kind of thing. We are afraid that some heretics will appear in the future, they put their hands into our garage, bathroom fixtures ... Compared to them, hackers who peek at our emails and bank accounts through clouds are dwarfed.

Perhaps the bigger concern is privacy. Our information-sharing of the virtual world remains to be seen, and it does not mean that we are passionate about it in real life. We interact with various objects, so we need to disclose our information specifically-where we are, what we are doing ...

That's not the count. For the programmable world, the biggest threat comes from the most common problem-energy. Each sensor needs electricity, most of which are batteries, and low-power protocols allow battery life to last for years, but in the end the old orientation is removed. Hopefully we'll be able to see the radio source in a couple of years (using magnetically coupled resonance) into commercial use, so that electricity can be fired from a charging station a few miles away to an electrical device.

For half a century, the idea that inanimate objects should be filled with life and let the material world do everything to us is already the subject of science fiction. Sometimes we worry that what we create is not smart enough, and sometimes we worry that they are too clever. But in fact, like today's programmable computers, the "intelligence" of the future programmable world will never surpass or lower the "intelligence" we inject into its distributed parts.