The next digital revolution

Luciano Floridi on the next digital revolution, still a ways off, but it will change everything (from the Philosophers Magazine Online)

They call it “The Internet of Things” (ITU report, November 2005 www.itu.int/internetofthings) and it is the next stage in the digital revolution. The recipe is simple: take our current information and communication technologies, including Internet, mobiles, PCs, PDAs, iPods, DVDs and so forth. Add two enabling technologies: sensor hi-tech, for data collection, and smart technologies, for appropriate data processing and interactions. Shrink everything to the size of a grain of sand, thanks to nanotechnology. Then pack this speck into a RFID (a Radio Frequency IDentification) tag, which can store and remotely retrieve data from an object and give it a unique identity, like a barcode. Finally, incorporate this tiny microchip (tags can measure 0.4 mm 2 and are thinner than paper) in everything, including humans and animals and, voilà, you have created ITentities. Imagine now networking all these ITentities together and you obtain the Internet of Things, a fully interactive and responsive environment of wireless, pervasive, distributed, a2a (anything to anything) information processes, that works a4a (anywhere for anytime), in real time.

Of course, most of these as are still in the (fast approaching) future. The crucial stage in their development is the global standardisations of a Babel of protocols, codes, interfaces, radio frequencies etc., required for their seamless and transparent communication. But ITentities themselves are already a common reality. In Barcelona, the V(irtually?)IP customers of the Baja Beach Club can have a Verichip implanted to identify themselves and to pay for their drinks (ah, the allure of exclusive branding!). In 2004, according to www.technologyreview.com, approximately 40 million people in the US carried some form of RFID device in their pockets.

RFID applications range from electronic toll collection to animal identification, from supply chain management to library systems. You find them in airports, barracks, car parks, hospitals, prisons, schools, supermarkets, warehouses. Wal-Mart has made them compulsory for all its suppliers. Your home is the last frontier.

The advantages are obvious, but alas, its potential disadvantages are equally considerable. The main threats concern privacy. RFID tags may disclose information pertaining to personal properties, allow the reconstruction of a costumer's spending profile or physical locations. Solutions are being developed to tackle these problems (the “kill command”, for example, disables the tag once the product has been purchased), but the issue is tricky, since ITentities' functionalities may be retained precisely in order to enjoy the advantages of an Internet of Things, like anti-thief systems for cars or security doors for offices and labs. Still, we are placing eyes and ears everywhere, so concerns and complaints are mounting. The CASPIAN organisation (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion And Numbering, www.nocards.org) boycotted Benetton's tagged products in 2003, and is currently campaigning against Tesco and Gillette.

The ethical aspects are not the only ones of philosophical interest, though. When the threshold between analogue-offline and digital-online realities becomes blurred, ethical issues will probably appear to be the consequence of a more fundamental, ontological shift. ICTs are reengineering the world. This year, AI celebrates its 50 th anniversary. For half a century, we have tried to evolve agents that could replace us for tasks that would otherwise require our intelligence. Nowadays, the most successful artificial agents are not robots but webbots operating online, in their ideal environment, like digital fish swimming in cyberspace. We still do incomparably better in real life, but when cyberspace does finally spill over into our world, it will be up to us, the intelligent and lazy agents, to adapt to the new environment in which cars will talk not only to fuel stations but to anyone who is ready to listen.

(Luciano Floridi (www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi) teaches philosophy at the Università degli Studi di Bari and Oxford University and is the author of Philosophy and Computing: an Introduction).