Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Pretty content free, new tech could be scary kind of thing.

By and large, the good things that come out of IoT will be larger in number to the not so good things, by virtue of the fact that folks are generally designing these things to do useful things. We know that because every technology that has been developed, its intent leads to a skewed distribution of 'good' or 'bad' uses. For example 'cars' many more 'good' uses than 'bad' uses, 'bombs' many more 'bad' uses than 'good' uses. Some things which are just a basic discovery like 'plastic' about an equal number of good and bad uses.

I am completely not persuaded that "developing nations won't benefit" as a stand in for 'bad'. There are two ways that argument fails for me, if this stuff is going to be a huge enabler, why is the article so glum? If its going to be a huge problem isn't not having access to it a benefit? That there will be groups where it will be structurally impossible for them to get this technology at the same time is probably a good thing from a future planning perspective.

I've read stories of farmers in developing nations using modified cellphones to control distant irrigation pumps via SMS, saving them significant travel time. I think the IoT will help everyone in the areas they can benefit most, so long as it remains possible to detach one's equipment from the manufacturers' cloud services and retain one's privacy.

A gentleman in Greece showcased on HN his Arduino code he wrote for his father to do just this thing, just a month or two ago:

http://www.stavros.io/posts/arduino-powered-irrigation-syste...

I live in Illinois and my grandmother lives in Central Florida. I installed a Nest thermostat, Protect sensors, as well as an IP-enabled sprinkler controller (http://www.roslen.com/products.html). I can manage her entire home remotely for her, so when she calls, its "click click all done".

The "Internet Of Things" is already here.

Yes, they are also monitoring their soil quality with web-connected soil sensors.

> For example 'cars' many more 'good' uses than 'bad' uses, 'bombs' many more 'bad' uses than 'good' uses.

You don't think that's a little over-simplistic?

Last year, cars killed ~1.2 million people around the world.

From explosive incidents, it's hard to tell, but doing some quick Google it seems to hover around 50,000 per year.

Cars also probably cause climate change, bombs don't. Cars get us around quicker, but at the cost of our health.

Bombs can end wars, and we quickly reached nuclear neutrality after the cold war.

Bombs are great in comparison to the automobile.

He's not saying cars, in absolute terms, have smaller bad effect than bombs. He's saying that the positives vs negatives ratio for cars is more favorable than one for bombs. Considering the entire world economy will essentially stand still if all cars vanish tomorrow, I'd agree with him.

Just because the economy would collapse if something vanished overnight, doesn't necessarily mean that thing is good.

For instance, if McDonalds disappeared overnight, people would starve. Doesn't mean the McChicken is a "good" thing we should let incept our culture, like the Internet of Things, which is what this article is arguing is actually "bad."

Just because we can become dependent upon something easily doesn't mean it really makes the world a better place.

And that is the problem with trying to make a moralist based argument in a objectivist discussion right? I chose not to go there.

When debating the SF ordinance about the relative health benefits of "Happy Meals" questions came up like "Does Ronald McDonald house help more people with cancer than Big Macs make fat?" or "Do jobs provided by McDonalds to an otherwise unskilled population lower the crime rate?"

Debating the philosophical aspects of things can be enlightening but in this particular case, and in this particular article, that really wasn't the case. "Experts are worried" is just about as non-useful a statement as can be made about anything.

The observation I make is that *in totality of changes caused" by a technology, those that were created to do 'good' and or 'useful' [1] things generally have more good and useful uses than evil and/or threatening uses. I expect that to be true of the emerging IoT technology as well (more useful things than bad things).

Another interesting side effect is that if the balance shifts things can be made less useful, the case of decongestants comes to mind.

[1] In quotes because they are subjective measures.

> I expect that to be true of the emerging IoT technology as well (more useful things than bad things)

It's very hard to tell wether something does "more good than bad."

But we can look at the history of technology and predict which areas of research tend to create the most elegant results. Medical technology is a great example. Alleviation of useless suffering.

It can be made good because it is, at its heart, science. Internet of Things is not so. The products IoT creates will be by companies trying to extract capital from customers.

There's no science to IoT, there's no elegant beauty, and there's a tremendous risk of extending the NSA's vision even deeper into our lives.

At the risk of derailing this further, I disagree with this:

"It's very hard to tell wether something does 'more good than bad.'"

If you ask the population using the technology in question if its more good than bad they will answer "yes" or "no". If 51% of them think it is more good than bad, then by definition it is more good than bad.

Completely agree ChuckMcM, and further more, I feel it is important to realise that we are discussing the issues with IoT early on, before most people are using IoT devices. There are a huge number of people working on the solutions to the problems listed in the article.

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