A car is a set of qualities, a person can be described as a long set of qualities, a park can be described as a set of qualities. Before the Internet of Things, humans decided these lists and sets of qualities. After the Internet of Things it will be a mix of entities deciding this, and in this mix are the protocols, algoritms and code that inform the databases what is data and what is noise. What is the role of objects and machine to machine (M2M) in this process? They can give clear signals, they can also be difficult and confusing.
In the afternoon we walked across the bridge very near the Kremlin to Strelka, the high level design and architecture lab to continue the discussion on a more practical level. The Internet of Things means small computers or tags in basically every object. Our world becomes media, as any object can trigger a movie, a url, a story, no longer being tied to discrete units such as tv or radio. IoT is inevitable. But there is a choice. There is a choice in planning: for a city of ‘friends’ or for a city of ‘strangers’, for a city of 'magic' where any relationship can become real or a city of 'chill' where only a few preferred paths guide you through the city.
After all, was Plato's Academy not a public park?
Rob van Kranenburg is encouraging a vision that is a balance of relatively autonomous local priorities and 'soul' coupled with a set of generic global protocols.
Thus Wise Moscow needs building it with a Russian soul, with poetry and making citizens part of it, connecting high business with the cultural elite and bringing back old manual skills, stop the ‘efficiency’ paradigm and bring back people into the technological loop: smart shopping+ cassier (concept of George Prokopchuk)