Here’s How The Internet Of Things (IoT) Will Impact Self-Driving Cars

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

(Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/)

Internet of Things (IoT), it is all around us, and yet it also has only just begun.

Some estimates are that there exist today around 8 to 9 billion IoT devices globally, and by the year 2021 there will be perhaps 30 billion IoT devices worldwide.

That’s a tripling of growth.

By some accounts that’s actually a very conservative number and the growth rate could be several times higher.

According to various researchers, on a daily basis we might have 1,000 to 5,000 objects surrounding us at any point in time that could potentially someday have an IoT device on them.

We are headed toward an era known as ubiquitous computing or what some call pervasive computing.

This refers to computers that are everywhere we are.

What has suddenly brought forth this emergence of IoT?

It’s the grand convergence of the ongoing miniaturization of computers, allowing them to be small enough to put on just about anything.

These chips are also durable enough that they can survive while on whatever they are placed on or into. They are powerful enough to have features that make them useful, such as sensing light, sensing temperature, capturing sounds, etc. They are getting lower in cost; thus they are inexpensive to use. Some even say that we should consider this to be “disposable” computing, meaning that it is so cheap that even if only used for short duration and then discarded, it’s worth the cost.

As aside, there are concerns that disposable computing is going to become a massive environmental nightmare. Think about how much ecological damage those millions upon millions of discarded computer chips could create.

What really makes these IoT devices significant is that they have the ability to electronically communicate.