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2016 Year in Preview: The Future of IoT

spannerspencer

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Building on our look into the future to see what will be the tech leaders in 2016, a discussion on the Internet of Things seems entirely essential, I'm sure you'll agree.


Of course, there's nothing particularly new about IoT. At least, not as far as the electronics world goes, which moves at a fair old lick. But perhaps you'll forgive my boldness here, when I suggest that IoT still doesn't quite feel to have hit its stride yet.


Could 2016 be the year of IoT?


Is 2016 Finally the Year of the Internet of Things?


Don't get me wrong. IoT has come a long way, and it finally feels poised for mainstream consumption. It's plagued with difficulties, which is probably why, despite its broad appeal and significant adoption, it's still not "quite there," if you know what I mean?


IoT is so close, however, that it's day in the sun must be just around the corner. At this stage, it can't not be. Do you feel like 2016 could be the year when the Internet of Things breaks free and runs wild? If so, what shape will it take, and what kind of evolution is it primed to enjoy?


Tell us all about the future of the Internet of Things below (and what you'd like to see, as much as what we will see), and we'll reconvene this time next year to see how close we got to the mark.

  • IoT has this enormous potential to be far more ubiquitous, but it is not held back by technology so much as developers. It is not possible for the current technocrats to realize the full potential of IoT - there just aren't enough developers to implement all the potential applications and they do not have the knowledge of all the other experts in other fields to even know what applications are needed. It is only when IoT development systems become easy for anyone to use that the IoT explosion will truly ignite. Education is a possible method to increase the cadence of development, but the real catalyst will be development systems that are trivial to learn or self-teaching or intuitive or able to understand a spoken concept well enough to automatically convert it to a working solution.

    It may take a while to get there, but we can start with higher-level programming languages (which are actually simpler and smarter than existing languages) and smarter compilers - users shouldn't even need to know what a compiler does or even that they exist. Initially, we need programming languages designed for non-programmers. I know it sounds like blasphemy to "real" programmers, but such languages will give rise to far more programs than all languages to date, combined. Simply because there will be billions of "programmers" using them. At some point the the competition for this gigantic non-programmer market is going to heat up. People want to create - they just need affordable, understandable tools.

    The technology to automatically transform drawings and ideas into hardware is already starting to be developed and we can expect significant progress in this direction with not just multi-material 3D printed objects, but complete programmable electro-mechanical systems automatically generated.