Internet of things
Hi everybody,
todays seminar was mostly about the Internet of Things and I loved it. The concepts we learn each Monday are getting more and more applicable and related to our daily life.
We followed our weekly routine of talking about an interesting article we read last week. Amd todays article really opened my eyes of how less control I actually have. I was not aware of the fact that by the way engineers design software and hardware, they do decosions for us – but this statement is so true. Todays technical opportunities just give us the illusion to be able to make our own decisions, but in realitiy we give away our free and concious ability decide away to others, whose might decide different than we would.
An example for the limitation of our decisions in daily life are self-driving cars: the illusion here is that we are able to steer and intervene whenever we want, it is the illusion of having the complete control about whatever the car does, even when an accident happens. In reality however, the car is controlled by a software, which calculates according to the programming of an anymous engineer. And if this not not-by-you controlled software decides it will be better to kill you instead of five other people in an accident, then there is nothing you can do against it – although you would probably decided to stay alife if it were the one in control.
From that, we went on to exploring the advantages and disadvantages of the Internet of things. On the surface it seems as if the internet of things offers awesome opportuntinies to improve your life and make everything easier – you can have a personal camera in your house to watch your dog, a fridge that orders food indepently, a self-regulating thermostat, or watch your dad without being physically being there. Clear advantage of all of this: Convenience. The internet of things helps to make our daily life easier, since we do not have to take care of all the mundane daily tasks our life gets automated. This enables us to choose more freely with which activities we want to spend our time.
In addition, the internet of things helps us to be more sustainable since it allows us to use our resources much more efficiently. One example for this are water sprinklers in agriculture. They can control the amount of water which will be distributed to the soil according to weather forecasts and the amount of water right now. All of this is done automatically – and less water will be wasted than on traditional ways.
However, there are also a few disadvantages connected with the internet of things. First of all your privacy and security is constantly threatened. There is always the chance that of somebody hacks your network or your camera and gets access to your personal data. For example, if somebody gets access to your nest account, anynymous people would know when you were at home and when not, they could make you pay enormous amounts ofmoney by manipulating you thermostat and so on.
However, one always needs to keep the motivation of the cyberattack in mind and adjust the protection according to that. The motivation to manipulate the feeding machine of your cat is relativly low, so you do not need to put in a lot of effort to protect it against other peoples attack. Compared to that knowing the information of your bank account could be way more useful and therefore motivating to capture, thus you should put in considerably more effort into preotecting these data. Thinking forward and trying to act according to this can be really useful in these cases.
In the end, it always come back to weighing safety and privacy against convenience. At some point we have no ther choice we need to trust our devices. We need to trust that our money is safe in our virtual bank account, we need to trust that the camera of our phone is not recording right now. There will never be a guarantee that your private life is safe, and there is always a chance that you presonal information can be used in threatening ways.
This are this weeks reflections, thanks for reading 🙂