20 Quotes on the Value, Importance and Impact of the Internet of Things

People are talking about the Internet of Things a lot these days. They’re discussing how it could blur the distinction between physical reality and digital realms, how it will change life in many ways and why it could be the beginning of a world ruled by machines.

It’s a hot topic, but not as new as you might suppose. In the 1950s Alan Turing, an English computer scientist, was addressing the question: “Can machines think?” His work involved natural language processing (NLP), a branch of artificial intelligence that now includes cognitive computing, in which self-learning systems use data mining, pattern recognition and NLP to mimic human thinking processes. Over the past decade, the confluence of algorithmic breakthroughs, massive computing power and cloud delivery has made cognitive computing and the IoT possible.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is where the IoT gets applied to machine and devices used in manufacturing, healthcare, oil and gas production, autonomous vehicles and other areas. While the IoT has the potential to change the way people behave and interact with machines, it also offers the potential to achieve greater production and operating efficiencies by changing the way machines behave, “think,” learn and help operators make more informed decisions.

Intrigued? We hope so. And just to give you an idea of what people in various walks of life think about the IoT today, we compiled 20 quotes, starting with Turing.

1. “I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” – Alan Turing
2. “If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, so machines can learn, that is worth 10 Microsofts.” -- Bill Gates
3. "Smart homes and other connected products won't just be aimed at home life. They'll also have a major impact on business. And just like any company that blissfully ignored the Internet at the turn of the century, the ones that dismiss the Internet of Things risk getting left behind." – Jared Newman
4. “The Internet of Things is not a concept; it is a network, the true technology-enabled Network of all networks.” – Edewede Oriwoh
5. “With the IoT, we’re headed to a world where things aren’t liable to break catastrophically – or at least we’ll have a hell of a heads’ up. We’re headed to a world where our doors unlock when they sense us nearby.” – Scott Weiss
6. “As the Internet of things advances, the very notion of a clear dividing line between reality and virtual reality becomes blurred, sometimes in creative ways.” – Geoff Mulgan
7. “When you reduce the cost of failure, you see a big eruption of innovation.” – Gary Hauthier
8. “We are in a brave new world where not only do our children talk back to us, but so do our appliances.” – Mohammed Dastagir
9. “The internet is no longer a web that we connect to. Instead, it’s a computerized, networked, and interconnected world that we live in. This is the future, and what we’re calling the Internet of Things.” – Bruce Schneier
10. “Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence.” – Nicholas Negroponte
11. “One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.” – Ray Kurzweil
12. “You’re going to see this ‘Internet of things’ start demanding network performance and making the networks much more aware of what is on top of them.” – Hans Vestberg
13. “What the Internet of Things is really about is information technology that can gather its own information. Often what it does with that information is not tell a human being something, it [just] does something.” – Kevin Ashton
14. “If you think that the internet has changed your life, think again. The Internet of Things is about to change it all over again!” – Brendan O’Brien
15. “The Internet of Things is big news because it ups the ante: ‘Reach out and touch somebody’ is becoming ‘reach out and touch everything’.” Parker Trewin
16. “From conceptual standpoint, IoT is that ability to create digital awareness of the physical world we live in. It’s a digital pulse made up of data that we can aggregate to improve the world around us.” – John Rossman
17. “The opportunity we have is to build a secure, intelligent platform that solves some of the world's greatest problems at scale. That's what's possible with hundreds of billions of connections and the capabilities that we can deliver together.” – Chuck Robbins
18. “The Internet of Things is going to be a real gamechanger for loyalty, just like mobile has been to date. -- Brandon Logsdon
19. “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, I’d probably say that. So we need to be very careful.” – Elon Musk
20. “Whenever I hear people saying AI is going to hurt people in the future I think, yeah, technology can generally always be used for good and bad and you need to be careful about how you build it … if you’re arguing against AI then you’re arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents, and you’re arguing against being able to better diagnose people when they’re sick.” – Mark Zuckerberg

Industry 4.0, driven by the IoT and IIoT, is dawning. Few companies are ready for digital transformation. But just as the Internet fundamentally changed the way business gets done, so will Industry 4.0 change the way processes are analyzed and perfected; it’s probably only a matter of time before the topic is as commonplace as smartphones.

How can you begin to make the IIoT part of your business? We discuss that in another post, Preparing Your Business for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation, found here.