My talk at the O'Reilly Solid Conference on May 22, 2014. I mostly talk about UI implications of the Internet of Things, but also about the need for interoperability.
"I see eyes in my soup": How Delivery Hero implemented the safety system for ...
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Software Above the Level of a Single Device
1. Software Above the Level
of a Single Device
Tim OâReilly
Solid
May 22, 2014
1Thursday, May 22, 14
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âThe skill of writing is to create a context
in which other people can think.â
Edwin Schlossberg
2Thursday, May 22, 14
Edwin Schlossberg once said...
Thatâs another way of saying that the words we use are a kind of map that guides our thinking. And as you know, a good map leads us to our destination,
while a bad map leads us astray.
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So let me start with a word cloud of the words in the Internet of Things entry on Wikipedia. (By the way, that entry could really use some
work, and this group here is probably the right one to fix it.) Youâll see a huge focus on Things and Devices and Objects.
And those things are âsmart.â
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And to be sure, there are amazing smart things here at Solid. I want that Taktia smart router that can make it easy for me to
cut straight lines.
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And the Makani wind turbine - that uses smart controls to completely rethink how to generate wind power. By the way, that was invented
by my son-in-law Saul Griffith, now at @Otherlab.
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I want to highlight two other words in the word cloud. Look at this little word âpeople.â People are a really important
part of this emerging future. And I also want to highlight this tiny word over here: âTime.â People and Time are a
very big part of the IoT story. We need to get these a lot bigger in that word cloud!
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âThe Internet of Smart Thingsâ
ď§ Sensor and data driven
ď§ Autonomous
ď§ No human input
ď§ Real time
What We Tend to Imagine
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Here are some of the ideas that I think are commonly associated with the notion âsmart things.â But are they right?
Are they a good map? Or do they mislead us?
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Which one of these things is smart?
Smart Dumb?
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Most of you who have heard me talk about this subject before know that Iâm fascinated by the connection between the Google
autonomous vehicle and the Google Street view car. Is the autonomous vehicle smart, and the street view car dumb? I donât
think so. The two are part of a system, that includes both machines and humans. Those humans are augmented by sensors,
but are a critical part of the system. And the human input into the system is NOT real time, but is instead time-delayed. There
are a huge number of key concepts to unpack here.
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ď§ Human input is critical
ď§ That human input may be time delayed, as a
learned memory
ď§ That human input may be implicit rather than
explicit
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Or consider the Nest Learning Thermostat. The Nest âlearns.â But who teaches it? We do, both by explicit actions, like turning the heat up or
down
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And of course, if you have one of these things, you realize that a lot of the input you give is the âold fashioned wayâ, through your phone or
tablet.
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But remember, they are still
USER INTERFACES
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Explore, test, measure, just like you do with any other UI in the modern world. There is a huge period of experimentation ahead on the UI front. Do we
tell our devices what we want by touching them, by talking to them, or just by being around them? How do these modes relate? For example, it
seems to me that when I set an explicit schedule for my Nest, it stops learning. (I guess people do that too, which is why itâs best to set a vision
rather than be too explicit!)
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Beautiful, smart, but didnât think about
how I might want to use it
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Hereâs a great example of a smart thing that misses the mark because it didnât think enough about the user. The Tesla key is beautiful. It
wakes up my car automatically, and has hidden controls I can double click. But guess what: I canât put it on a key ring. Thatâs a design failure.
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Thereâs this great sticker that gets handed out by the UK Government Digital Service - I got this sheet of them from the UK CTO, Liam
Maxwell - that says âWhat is the user need?â The GDS has done a great job of focusing on designing with user needs put first, and
thereâs a lesson there for hardware designers too. (GDS Design Principles: https://www.gov.uk/design-principles )
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Itâs important not to look at a device like the Nest in isolation. Itâs connected to the phone, theyâve introduced their smoke detector
that is networked through the house, and uses the wifi-connected thermostat as its hub....
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Thatâs also true of the Google self-driving car. Itâs in a network that relies on GPS satellites, data in data centers. And
eventually connections with other cars and smart road infrastructure like traffic lights that will broadcast in advance
how long till they are about to change, so cars can optimize their speed.
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And within that cloud data center, there are cooling systems that are packed with sensors to automatically regulate the temperature
and control the flow of warm and cold fluids through the data centerâs circulatory system. And those cloud centers are themselves
networked.
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âThe Network of Networksâ
Interoperability!
Interoperability!
Interoperability!
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But if we are going to be thinking about this âInternet of Thingsâ as part of the Internet, letâs make it a real internet. And that means
Interoperability, Interoperability, Interoperability. They used to call the Internet âthe network of networksâ because all the old networks
didnât talk well to each other. Letâs not repeat that mistake. Right now, we donât really have an Internet of Things. We have a bunch
of Intranets of Things.
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The Robustness Principle
âBe conservative in what
you send, be liberal in
what you accept from
others.â
RFC 761
Jon Postel
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One of the key tenets of the early internet design was something called âThe Robustness Principle.â The idea was that the internet would
be robust if people followed what really amounts to the Golden Rule applied to networks. âBe conservative...â
This needs to be true of the Internet of Things as well.
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âUseful software written above the level
of the single device will command high
margins for a long time to come.â
-Dave Stutz, âOn Leaving Microsoftâ
February 11, 2003
Dave Stutz
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http://www.synthesist.net/writing/onleavingms.html
Thereâs another framing concept about networks that is a key part of my thinking. Dave Stutz, in his parting letter
to Microsoft back in 2003, had this great line âSoftware above the level of a single device.â It has shaped my thinking
ever since.
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Consider Uber - not generally thought of as an IoT startup. (Though it should be. It depends on the sensors in the smartest
devices any of us carry around today - our smartphones. Itâs not just an app. Itâs a network. It only works because not only the
passenger but a network of drivers are reporting their locations at all times. The whole thing depends on what Iâve long been
calling âthe Internet operating system.â You have features like communications, payment, reputation, many of which come from
outside vendors via API.
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âUber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building
for how the world *should* work
instead of optimizing for how the
world *does* workâ - Aaron Levie of
Box.net
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But hereâs the point I really want to make here: Aaron Levie of Box said it perfectly in a tweet: âUber is a $3.5 billion lesson in
building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work.â
Once âthingsâ become smart, you can reinvent the whole business process, what IBM calls âsystems of interaction.â
Uber is reinventing the taxi business. What else could be completely reinvented?
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Another service that uses the location sensor to rethink a real world process into âhow it ought to beâ instead of how it is, is @coverpay.
This is one of the companies we invested in at OATV. It gives an uber-like experience for restaurants. When youâre done, you just
get up and walk out. Your credit card is automatically charged, because the restaurant knows who you are. GPS, images, but also
credit cards bypassed by cloud registration - remember that mag stripe is a primitive way of getting data in and out via sensor too!
Thereâs a design pattern here: when you know several things about someone (e.g. restaurant reservation + location + face) you can
do things (with permission) like charge a credit card automatically. By the way, Cover just launched in San Francisco, and if
you sign up and use my twitter handle (@timoreilly) as a referrer code, youâll get a $10 discount on your first order. Drinks on me! (Works
in NY too.)
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Another amazing one is Makespace. What they realized is that if you can take pictures, so you know what you put in your storage boxes, they
can be stored and retrieved in a whole new way - much more like a modern warehouse retrieves stuff rather than your crowded storage locker
loaded with boxes whose contents are soon unknowable. And this illustrates that it doesnât have to be super complex sensing. Itâs more a matter
of thinking how to deploy sensors and then ask yourself what you can do differently now that you know something via that sensor.
And remember that the camera and the microphone are among the most important sensors. We are used to them, and we take them for granted.
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Work on what is hard
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I want to close with an appeal. We are at a moment when we are gaining great new capabilities, and can build applications that would have
seemed magical to people only a few years ago. And itâs still only the beginning!
But donât just think about building cool new consumer applications. Work on what is hard. The physical world isnât just something we do for
entertainment or information sharing. Itâs the place where we actually live, where âmatters of life and deathâ isnât a metaphorical saying.
Think about meaningful real world problems that you can make a difference with. Thank you very much.