InsightaaS: In his Rough Type blog, Internet/IT philosopher Nicholas Carr has an ongoing series, “The Realtime Chronicles,” that provides a refreshing, somewhat cynical view of the trends towards Big Data and the Internet of Things. In this post, Carr follows current pronouncements from sources like McKinsey and eBay to a future where “personal decisions are made prenow, by communications among software-infused things.”
People are forever buttonholing me on the street and saying, “Nick, what comes after realtime?” It’s a good question, and I happen to know the answer: Ambient Reality. Ambient Reality is the ultimate disruption, as it alters the actual fabric of the universe. We begin living in the prenow. Things happen before they happen. “Between the desire / And the spasm,” wrote T. S. Eliot, “Falls the Shadow.” In Ambient Reality, the Shadow goes away. Spasm precedes desire. In fact, it’s all spasm. We enter what I call Uninterrupted Spasm State, or USS.
In “How the Internet of Things Changes Everything,” a new and seemingly machine-written article in Foreign Affairs, two McKinsey consultants write of “the interplay” between “the most disruptive technologies of the coming decade: the mobile Internet and the Internet of Things.” The “mobile-ready Internet of Things,” as they term it, will have “a profound, widespread, and transformative impact on how we live and work.” For instance, “by combining a digital camera in a wearable device with image-recognition software, a shopper can automatically be fed comparative pricing information based on the image of a product captured by the camera.” That’s something to look forward to, but the McKinseyites are missing the big picture. They underestimate the profundity, the ubiquity, and the transformativeness of the coming disruption. In Ambient Reality, there is no such thing as “a shopper.” Indeed, the concept of “shopping” becomes anachronistic. Goods are delivered before the urge to buy them manifests itself in the conscious mind. Demand is ambient, as are pricing comparisons. They become streams in the cloud…
Read the entire post: http://www.roughtype.com/?p=3809
