In 2008, the number of devices that connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people. That number continues to rise, thanks to a growing number of connected devices and gizmos, ranging from televisions to soda machines. Folks at Cisco have put together this infographic to showcase the growth of the Internet of things.
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Infographic courtesy of Cisco.
What a creepy future in store for us. We’re like moths to a flame with all this tech stuff. Supposedly connected more than ever, but so disconnected from the natural world. We’re slaves to our own inventions.
Machines have won. There is one option – the off switch. I am going to turn off and go for a walk now. Have a great sunday
Om, same here! Thanks and I hope you have a good day too.
There is no off switch. Ever tried powering off your PC? It can even refuse to power off. It’s a soft switch. I regularly pull the cord out to reboot.
Machines cannot do anything really useful it seems. The machines that were supposed to keep the Japanese nuclear plant under control failed miserably.
Yeah, I agree. Let’s go back to horses, rampant childbirth deaths and cholera. Crikey, I miss those days.
No, lets stick with AIDS, mad cow, bird flu and other man invented diseases to exterminate us.
You are very smart, better unplug that cable from the back of your head :))))
Think about the possibilities that are there with this innovation. I can see thousands of ideas coming out of this. And there is always that off switch as mentioned before if you don’t want to be a part of it.
The best things in life aren’t things.
This may be true, but your love life will apparently have an IP address independent of you and your significant other. According to this predicted future…
Machines don’t win. People surrender – often all too willingly.
I find it strange that our predictions of technical utopia are always centered around convenience instead of happiness and fulfillment. So what if I can get an extra 5 minutes of sleep? that’s not paradise. The more convenient our lives get, the less fulfilling they are.
Good point Pete!
The idea isn’t that those 5 extra minutes may only be used for extra sleep, but for spending a few more minutes in bed with your wife, helping your child with their school work, or going for a short walk before tackling the day – Things that actually give you fulfillment. Those extra 5 minutes throughout the day and over months and years really add up. Humans are not lacking challenges in their lives, in fact whenever life gets more convenient, we are able to take on more challenges that we would have otherwise. Spending 15 more minutes in traffic isn’t going to make my life more fulfilled. I’d rather spend that time going for a nice walk to start the day.
Pity Cisco’s boring and long-winded netacad notes drag out so much that one has little time for subjects of interest in one’s IT course, let alone an extra five minutes of sleep. Yuk.
This is really very interesting if you go back 50 years and tell some one about this >>> (beyond imagination), so guys what do you think will happen after that? Any one with a wild imagination?
It so true what they say about us being so connected yet so disconnected. The internet is brilliant, I can comment on this article right now and communicate with everyone who is reading this comment… yet I don’t know any of you and I most likely never meet you.
I think the introduction of internet on phone and tablets will allow people to still be people and stay connected. I live in London and couldn’t imagine not being able to go out an socialise yet still keep up to date with email and on going of the net.
wow! I found this link through digg and I thought this is an interesting infographic! 🙂
Nice and interesting article 😀
I like the part of Ipv6 protocol :))
I find it hard to believe that, by the end of this year, 20 households will generate internet traffic equivalent of entire internet traffic in 2008. To me 1998 would make more sense.
That seems a bit far-fetched to me as well. 1998 is more feasible.
1998 looks like a stretch too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic
@Ankur, Thanks, that stat is attributed to Jim Cicconi, VP at AT&T (there’s a source link at the bottom of the infographic). We try to provide lots of sources (not just Cisco’s) in our material, so we get a well rounded perspective, but that stat has been questioned quite a bit – I’m going to dig into that one a bit further… the sentiment is absolutely correct as we are seeing exponential traffic growth, but the specific timeframe looks suspect.
“The Terminator” doesn’t seem that unrealistic now.
I personally enjoy new technologies – but only to an extent. The concern that the human race is becoming far more reliant on technology to make life easier, is seemingly resulting in the human race becoming less active, forgoing simple activities that helped us evolve and survive as a race.
Will man’s need for rapidly advancing and innovative technologies lead to his eventual demise? Or will it give the prying eye of the greater powers that be, even more control…? Just a thought.
@Dishram, one of the things we don’t factor in is that as technology advances and machines get “smarter”, it’s not a “them vs. us” scenario. We will ultimately embed more technology into ourselves to augment our own capabilities, for example, we think nothing of artificial cochleas, hearts, pacemakers, etc., today, and in the future, exoskeletons, artificial retinas, brain-controlled prosthesis, etc., will be common place. In essence we merge with technology. While it sounds far fetched, much of what we take for granted today, also did only a few decades ago. So, a terminator scenario IMHO is less likely as mankind and technology continue to fuse.
“To lead a telescopic life is also to be close to others without feeling their warmth.
To have proximity without community.
Telepresence without presence of mind.
To drown in a dark sea of numbers,
Under a bottomless bright night sky.”
– South to the Future [<– BTW, this is a "thing" available on the 'net…]
Also go and find the classic SF novel "Other Days, Other Eyes" by Bob Shaw.
Om, thank you very much for posting this today, it made my day … I was feeling a bit down after reading one of Paul Kedrosky’s dystopian blog posts!
People please stop to think about this first. Why don’t they simply use the Local Area Network to solve the cattle issue (if there is an issue to manage things in a local area). The significance of using a universally addressed network is to bring universal connection to someone else on the Internet, not just the cattle owner right? It is then not about disconnection or more connection. It is more about reconfiguration of control over connection.
One example of this is the way we construct our tax system, water system, or even sewage system, those infrastructure systems that have certain local yet global characteristics. I will be much impressed if CISCO has done this with carbon emission monitoring system and pushed for the carbon deal by different players in the world to be layout in universal network with transparent data to impose accountability!
(Count-> Accounting -> Accountability)
Thus, with real Internet of “things”, the first target of challenge is monetary system. If things can connect and talk to one other with all different kinds of signals in various calculating formula for barter system, then why do we need global monetary system after all?
@Han-Teng – great comment, especially about the global monetary system v.s. barter … can you imagine what would Jean-Claude Trichet or Ben Bernanke think of your idea? To them it would be unfathomable. What if Apple and Google become the next big “central banks”? Ha ha! Obama campaigned as an agent of “change” eh? He better spend more time in Silicon Valley and less time in the D.C. beltway! But seriously, your post helped even more to make my day after reading about all the noise and BS going on in Washington lately with the debt ceiling etc. (debt ceiling won’t matter if the internet of things can blow up fiat currency)!
Welcome to the machine!
And the answer is … 42.
Being a farmer’s son I wonder: the 200mb from the cow, is that 200 millibit?
Nice infographic! 🙂
One thing stands out a bit though: “By the end of 2011, 20 typical households will be generating more traffic than the entire Internet in 2008.” That looks very improbable to me, to say the least…
Just wanted to note that this was a great infographic for explaining the spectrum of what could be. Well done to the designers and creatives behind this.
It is interesting to note that we’re becoming overpowered and yet we’re scared of the technology we have and use daily. I find that the electricity our technology uses could be used for more useful things than just looking up Google or Wikipedia but we’re so drawn to technology that we become part of and use (and buy) more technology for non-sense stuff. As I said, we’re becoming dependent on technology but soon enough artificial intelligence technology will depend on us. But we are yet not in those future times.
Why doesn’t anyone bother to check the math on this? 20 households generating as much traffic as the entire internet in 2008 is positively ridiculous. There are many approaches to debunking this, not the least of which would be to point out that that would represent at least a 13.5 million fold increase in traffic in 3 years. But possibly the most effective is this:
Estimated total monthly bandwidth usage in 2008, for the US only, was about 1.1 exabytes according to Cisco. divide by 31 days, then by 24 hours/60minutes/60seconds/20 households/8 bits… would require about a 2.6 gigabit connection… going full time all the time… It would require that those households DL/UL… 1.8 million gigabytes per DAY on average.
Seems to me more and more of these insane statistics are quotes and no one questions them anymore.
It’s from AT&T
“”The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” he said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1034_3-6237715.html#ixzz1SSzuOHFs
Ah, so if you follow the link, you see that AT&T, an ISP, made the statement. That explains everything.
They probably made that statement right about the same time they were pushing for a rate increase, or something.
So there’s a source that’s just as wrong, great. What shocks me is that people are quoting this and can’t seem to understand how ridiculous a claim this is. Even CNET has not commented at how utterly idiotic that number is.
He even contradicts his own claim later when he says that he expects a 50 fold increase by end of 2015, which leads me to believe he misspoke about the 20 households… maybe he meant 20 million households which makes sense, it would mean about a 10 to 15 fold increase in traffic from 2008 to 2011…
Here’s the thing though, many seem to take the claim at face value, and that’s scary. I really don’t understand why people antennae don’t immediately twitch when given outrageous statistics like that.
“By the end of 2011, 20 typical households will generate more internet traffic than the entire internet in 2008.”
This sounds completely false. Any ideas on what they may have meant?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic
Assuming wikipedia is right, you couldn’t even give that stat about 1998.
Just what the article says above. Everything you own will be hooked to the internet.
What’s left out of this equation is the 2 hours a day spent debugging all these miraculous systems to figure out why they’re not working.
“Each cow transmits 200mb data per year” it made my day 🙂
The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 2012. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Waiting for the day when cows automatically turn up at the front door and milk themselves when the refrigerator discovers the milk has run out and wirelessly communicates with the embedded wireless cows.
Waiting for the day when the cows automatically show up at the front door and milk themselves when the refrigerator dicovers it is out of milk and wirelessly communicates with the embedded wireless cows using a combination of zigbee, WiFi and LTE technologies
Well, a comment on all those “creepy” things that they’re learning. They’re not really. It’s a matter of inter connectivity and fairly simple assumptions created by the programmers. All of those examples listed above could be easily programmed in a week, by no more than a few people.
You may ask, why aren’t they? Simple. Tech companies don’t (and probably never will entirely) get along. However, if they put a concerted effort into linking their software and devices together, it could be easily accomplished.
And hence, the problem with creating human-like AI persists. How do you program something so that it “learns” without basing what it “learns” on assumptions programmed in?
All of this equals… Skynet
Excellent point David. Finally someone on here gets it.
Yes but will the networks be able to handle all that data?
If I take my everyday experience with computers and extrapolate that to a fully integrated lifestyle like the one described above, I vacillate between hysterical laughter and suicidal ideation.
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This will make us even more lazier, already we are such sloths.
This will make us even more lazier, already we are such sloths.
In case you haven’t seen this summer 2011 Internet of Things infographic_
http://t.co/rfLSVhRa
Si nada se tuerce, en este campo irá mi proyecto fin de carrera: Internet of Things http://t.co/7px8wu2r