Hi all,

I started writing some answers from questions from Christian Frauenberger and I am thinking it makes good holidays reading :)

Salut, Rob

-

What is your role/background in the IoT world?

On my background I suggest readers to quickly read this text in which I recount how the seeds for the Internet of Things think tank, Council, were first planted back in 1996.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8090451

On my role I say with Bob Dylan; got be here as long as I can and talk and listen to likeminded (meaning of a similar mind) people.

* Given the pervasiveness (125bn connected devices by 2030) and smartness (AI) of digital devices in our world:

    - what will this do to us as humanity? 

It is already doing what it is supposed to do, showing us our intellectual weakness and moral inability to stewardship of humans, animals, things, in short our arrogance in misunderstanding the cooperative nature of 'gatherings'. Even a thing is not solid, it is an amalgam of resources, care (if care is 'applied') and skills. Once the Althing was a gathering. Things have always been active agents. Once made 'dead' in extractive capitalism, there is no way to revive them in the old way. Then they are simply tagged and added with sensors. The extreme simplicity of their readings of mundane processes (speed, weight, height, rhythm, sound, temperature....) combined with extreme predictability and simplicity of human behavior is the first step to take decision making away from immediate human analogue experience into a 'model' of behavior. This model will serve as input for other models and will thus be removed with every step with real human contact, to touch someone, to look him or her in the eye, to ask what is going on?

    - what are desirable roles of these devices? 

To support us in mid and long term decision making. Humans think short term and have no feeling for a longer term impact. Their mortality prevents them from b being able to think without 'time' or place'. Their fears and ego fools them into thinking they are a 'individual' in need of resources beyond immediate needs, to impact fellow humans in various ways. Early limitations and boundaries have weakened.
The desirable role of devices is to form a system of systems impacting each and every subject and object in realtime (fully connected) in every day continuous decision making on the basis of a global algorithm that caters to humans, animals, machines and the ecosystem (plants) for each 25%.

    - what is the utopia, the vision we strive for and how do we define this? 

The utopia is simple and clear. A good life for humans and animals, supported by machines for any energy consumption needed for peaceful activities. So logical, so simple. So doable.

Christian Nold and me described the prerequisites for such an open source ecology in The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World, January 2011.

It was seen as very naive. It will be seen as naive still. I do not mind. It just shows the vast amount of resources and political will that converges in order to call this 'simplistic' and unrealistic. In the old days all the simple acts of good people were called 'miracles' because of the dangers they envisioned: simple people working together to enjoy and get wiser.

The authors articulate the foundations of a future manifesto for an Internet of Things in the public interest. Nold and Kranenburg propose tangible design interventions that challenge an internet dominated by commercial tools and systems, emphasizing that people from all walks of life have to be at the table when we talk about alternate possibilities for ubiquitous computing. Through horizontally scaling grass roots efforts along with establishing social standards for governments and companies to allow cooperation, Nold and Kranenberg argue for transforming the Internet of Things into an Internet of People.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297712672_The_Internet_of_People_for_a_Post-Oil_World

To finish and to instigate a discussion, we propose
perception is crucial to hearing the sap rise. I think we will see a critical blending of sense (perception) and sensor (data) networks, which are currently very separate. We need to combine affect and networks to create this new form of solidarity.
RK
a series of indicative standards that test the waters, raise awareness and make visible the gap between where we are now and where have to go. The triple challenges of climate change, peak oil and social breakdown are coming. The question is not if, but when. Our standards are a shock therapy to the current practice of making. The sociability standards are workable and stem directly from the urgen- cies we have discussed. They will ensure interoperability between all the emerging actors. They require the joining of different actors that so far have not been involved in the making of standards. All technological
standards are also social standards.
Proximity
• Systems that are designed by at least twenty people distributed across the world.
• Systems that are built less than 150 miles from where the raw materials are sourced.
• Systems that will not be deployed more than 50 miles from where they are built.
• Systems whose components are modular and backward compatible to allow local repair, upgrade and downgrade.
system Thinking
• Systems that fix end costs as a percentage on top of publicly available production, transportation and disposal costs.
• Systems that communicate the break down of energy costs of pro- duction, transport and breakdown of the product.
• Systems that automatically generate a fixed, public discussion u r l for each item.
Affect
• Systems that encourage face-to-face contact. • Systems that build mutual responsibility.
• Systems that encourage conflict.
• Systems that during their lifetime will be used by more than 5 people. • Systems that enable strong bonds between people and the environment. • Systems that treat resources as equals.

The utopia is thus a balance of centralization of resources and enablers and decentralization of services. Data stay with people, preferably in their 5G phones. They expose themselves as attribute based identities asking for services in a Vendor Relation Management framework. (Google Doc Searls).

    - how do we get there? 

We get there by turning the passport into a device that only talks to 'our clouds and platforms, enabling his to run our preferred algorithms and build our own AI in our data lakes enabled by the taxes of citizens.

Interestingly I recently learned of a novel by Margaret Pierce that described perfectly the utopia I envisage. In the book it is called a 'kenner'. All citizens have it and instead of being an instrument of control, it is a companion, a learning and supporting tool. The book Alsop pictures the combination of brico, bio and open source village and high tech apparatus that is running in the background solely for peaceful purposes. I have set up a Reading Club on it in my #IoT Meetup:
https://www.meetup.com/Internet-of-Things-Ghent/

    - what is the role of industry/academia/policy makers and society at large in getting there? 

In my work in the Strategy CSA of Next Generation Internet (ngi.eu) I propose a concrete three-step process to build a vibrant inclusive democratic internet ecosystem by 2025.

The first step is started: regulating data in GDPR. The second is regulating digital signatures for persons, eIDas is achieved. Future internet services composition will develop in digital signatures to be achieved in Taskforce Services (TS), and resilient architectures to be achieved in digital signatures in Taskforce Infrastructures (TI). Digital Signatures for services (banking, payment, energy, education, care, mobility, connectivity…) and Digital Signatures for architectures (virtual and analogue enablers of connectivity) are a tool to complement current actions on procurement and local agency as in this kind of SLA it does not matter that the original data sets and analytical platforms are not under your control. In this manner local stakeholders are a priority part of building the next layer of value, naming the new entities that are formed when AI inspired intelligence starts to see patterns unrecognizable before.

The third step is to embed these signatures for persons, services and architectures into a sustainable framework for access and identity.

This could be brokered by 
•    substituting the passport for a device (running Estonian e-card) talking to friendly servers, platforms and Clouds running public algorithms and ethical AI, enabling direct democracy through local referenda and embedding contributions from taxpayers in a rich value layer fostering innovative public and private services in a comprehensive sovereign framework
•    adding security, framework and architectural checks for any device when it receives the electrical appliance label that is mandatory in Europe for any device as the instance to validate compliance with zenroom
•    produce a European router (dowse.eu) running zenroom
•    and…

The most important feature of this approach is that identity becomes an activity dispersed over and managed by the person and his or her attributes profile, the object, machine or robot that performs the service and the enabling connectivity harnessed in an architecture.
Accountability over anonymity characterizes this approach as it underlies society in the 20th century itself. Tokenized trust is a key feature but only in the actual locality where face to face and communities of people work and live together.
This approach that builds reciprocity not over two, but three actors, is the only way to counter and overcome the incongruities that are currently eroding trust, fake news, synthetic data (information artificially manufactured, created algorithmically) and chimeras (organism contains at least two different sets of DNA), fake passports and passports for sale by national source signers.

This approach builds on the fixed identities of human beings in nationally signed passports, of goods in, GS.1 type of repositories and scenarios of behavior in taxonomies such as coelition.org and face and gait recognition capabilities and reorganizes them as ‘event’ identities.
This approach acknowledges that if we do not go back to before the very notions of Linnaeus classification and encyclopedic organization of Diderot, we will be continuously repairing, legally fighting and running behind realtime agency.
Identity is thus distributed over architecture, service and phone, signed in digital signatures, federated and attribute based only.

You can have thousands of ‘identities’, event identities, basically never exposing yourself as your ‘full set of properties, sorry for this engineering type of talking about people of flesh and blood and dreams and hope.

Technically it can be operationalized in a full open source hard and software environment. The hardware part needs to be procured from EU industry. The operating system, zenroom , is being developed in the EU project DECODE . It forms the heart, a Virtual Machine running embedded in a chip in the triangle: device (EU ‘passport), embedded SIM cards in services (wearables, home, connected car and smart city) and infrastructure (routers, 5G base stations).

Our main job in NGI.eu is to broker a new governance layer on these event identities including the DNA passport of each and every European, so a combination of the triangle device-service-antenna, goods/product passports, behavioral processes/body signatures and DNA.

We need an inclusive identity framework that is able to name, validate and build services on identities that will become a process between a device/controller of some kind (now smart phone), services (energy, mobility…) and the architecture.
That capability should be European.
It does three things:

•    It gradually fades out Facebook, Google (GAFA)
•    It creates European services through EU unified protocols that could be locally permission less deployed, thus winning us the third battle, after losing data and platform we cannot afford to lose ‘meaning’ (AI hitting Big data), as we don’t care where the ‘original’ data resides.
•    It restores European dignity, a vital belief in our agency to build meaningful and value creating infrastructures which is what (though)leaders should do.

Links
https://zenroom.org Dyne.org also is the content partner in the EU Blockchain NGI RIA LEDGER.