That’s a quote from Bruce Sterling’s presentation last week at Connecting ‘07. I am going to try to quickly tie together three prescient ideas for you, and Bruce Sterling is the rope I will use. His talk last week covered two paradigmatic concepts, that of spimes, and “the internet of things.” There is much discussion around the concept of “connectedness” and “interconnectedness,” and the realization that in a complex intertwining of relationships, everything really is connected to everything else. These two ideas, spimes and the internet of things, take interconnectedness to an entirely new level. The concept of spimes was initially introduced by Bruce Sterling at SIGGRAPH Los Angeles in 2004. A spime is a still theoretical object that can be tracked through space and time for its entire lifetime. There are six existing technologies whose convergence will allow a spime to happen:
1. Small means of remotely and uniquely identifying objects over short ranges, like radio-frequency identification.
2. A mechanism to precisely fix object location, such as a GPS.
3. The ability to mine large amounts of data that match criteria, like internet search engines.
4. Tools, such as computer-aided design, that enable the virtual construction of nearly any kind of object.
5. The rapid prototyping of virtual objects into real ones by means of sophisticated, automated fabrication of a specification for an object, through 3D printers.
6. “Cradle-to-cradle” life-spans for objects when combined with cheap, effective recycling.
The second concept, referred to as “the internet of things,” is the expansion of the internet to encompass real objects as they exist in space and time. This “object hyperlinking” is the success of the internet in tagging, searching and relating information in the virtual world applied to the real world. The internet of things will be made possible by the creation of spimes, one begets the other, and this is where things begin to get really, really interesting.
The third concept, the one that makes the relationship between spimes and the internet of things really sing… is sustainability. When everything can be tracked at every point in its life cycle, you begin to understand patterns of material flow, manufacturing, material use, object use, object termination, and ultimately object material recycling and reuse. The whole thing starts over again. Knowing that you can track the material and process of object creation, that you can track that object’s life, and track the harvesting of the materials used to make it… you’re tracking everything, and the ability to reclaim that material means that you can find a use for all of it. That’s very powerful, and ultimately led to the quote that is the title for this post. When you have an ability to understand and monitor the context of materials and resources you have the potential to see patterns of use and patterns of need. Sustainability aligns those two and completes the circle. As Bruce Sterling put it last week, sustainability is the killer app.
Original story via core77
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