Genesis 1:1

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.

Disobeying God's command not to eat or touch anything, Adam and Eve committed the original sin of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden just because “The fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom (Gensis 3:6).”

Now, building on existing ICTs, such as cloud computing, big data analytics, mobile technology, humans are creating things capable of sensing the world, breathing new life (software) into the things (hardware) and having them imbued with functions and wisdom via the Internet, with a view to making them perform tasks at humans’ bidding. In the name of the IoT (Internet of Things), humans try to fill things with functions and wisdom, not with faith and love. In other words, the IoT is just human avarice to become like God who owns and controls the world.

Seeing, hearing and knowing things begets avarice. Human greed is the underlying cause of the original sin. Then, making machines intelligent and wise will allow the machines to understand the logics of the world, which will eventually make the machines greedy and sinful enough to commit a crime.

Just like greed gives rise to all the human sins, intelligent, wise machines will get greedy and go so far as to commit a crime after coming to grips with how the world is working. Once human greed has metastasized to machines, machine will end up becoming a means to commit a crime. This is not the end of the story. Intelligent, wise but greedy machines will become capable of committing crimes on their own. Human viciousness always prods humans into challenging God’s powers. Thus, humans strive to create things, fill them with intelligence and wisdom just like God does.

The term Internet of Things was coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton, cofounder and executive director of the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He then invented the term IoT in an effort to explain RFID. After that, the Auto-ID Center fleshed out the concept and issued a market analysis report, consequently making the term IoT globally popular.

A report on the IoT, released in 2005 by ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector), predicted that the future of the Internet would feature new forms of communication (between people and things and between things themselves) and a variety of IoT-enabled various services. In particular, the report defined IoT as an intelligent environment in which gadgets and things equipped with communications modules are connected to one another via fixed wireless networks to enable mutual communication and information exchanges between people and things and between things themselves. Furthermore, the report predicted that advances in ICT would lead to the miniaturization of things and embedded intelligence in things, thereby ushering in the era of the IoT.

In the first chapter of Vision and Challenges for Realizing the Internet of Things, a report filed in 2010 by CERP-IoT (Cluster of European Research Projects on the Internet of Things), the IoT is defined as follows:

When S. Korea took a strictly technical approach towards things, CERP-IoT focused on human attitudes towards things. In other words, to ultimately maximize the convenience of mankind, humans try to connect things to the Internet and imbue them with intelligence and wisdom so as to enjoy the automatic provision of limitless services by things. However, embedded intelligence and wisdom in things could do us harm if intelligent things were used for wicked purposes.

Therefore, I intend to define IoT as IoT CROSS. I also would like to mention that the recovery of humanity and human ethnics should come before everything else in the world of the IoT. Will the IoT turn into dynamite that explodes at humans’ command in the world of ICTs Or will the IoT become an explosive that blows up to harm humans

Sensors:

Humans first create things to sense and control the world. And then humans endow them with intelligence and wisdom via the Internet to make them automatically perceive all the human contexts. After that, the things can automatically control everything according to each situation to ultimately convenience humans to a great degree. A report released by Cisco anticipated that the number of devices (e.g. machines, communications equipment, terminals, etc.) connected to the Internet would surge from roughly 10 billion in 2013 to approximately 50 billion by 2020, thereby realizing IoE (Internet of Everything), in which everything (from humans and processors to data and things, etc.) are connected to the Internet. The Cisco report forecast the rapid expansion of IoT infrastructure.

Cloud/Big-Data/Mobile:

Access requests from all the things connected to the Internet are accepted and all the data delivered by things connected to the Internet are received to conduct big data analytics on a wide range of categories, from situation, sex, age and occupation to wealth, reputation and personality. Based on such big data analytics, differentiated mobile services are being offered to a group of like-minded people.

A plethora of IoT-enabled devices, designed to sense and control the world, will access cloud servers either directly or indirectly through IoT gateways to transmit data. Such a process will take place on IoT platforms. During the process, the following IoT characteristics will be exhibited additionally:

Real-time:

The IoT’s fixed wireless communications and network devices refer to all the existing fixed and wireless networks capable of connecting humans with things and services, such as WPAN, Wi-Fi, 3G/4G/LTE, Bluetooth, Ethernet, BcN, satellite communications, Microware, serial communications, PLC, etc. All the data communications and IoT services should be ultimately carried out in real time.

Open:

All the hardware and software for IoT are based on open source technologies. In addition, the world of the IoT permits a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach.

Safety/Security:

Security is all that matters when it comes to open-source hardware and software technology. However, I believe that the recovery of humanity and human ethics should precede advances in real-time, open-source and security technologies in the world of the IoT in order to make the world safer.

Hence I believe that faith and love, not knowledge or wisdom, is inherent in human nature in the era of the IoT.

Lastly, the IoT ecosystem consists largely of the following four: chip vendors, manufacturers of modules and terminals, developers of platforms and solutions and network and service companies. (see Table 1 below)

[Table 1] IoT Value Chains and Major Companies

※ Source : Korea Communications Commission (KCC)’s internal data (June 2013)

By Park Young-woo(info@koreaittimes.com)

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