Digital life in 2025

I came across a report entitled "Digital life in 2025", that was produced in Elon University. 

Some of the predictions are:

1. Information sharing over the Internet will be so effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible, flowing like electricity, often through machine intermediaries.
2.  The spread of the Internet will enhance global connectivity that fosters more planetary relationships and less ignorance.
3. The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and big data will make people more aware of their world and their own behavior. 
4. Augmented reality and wearable devices will be implemented to monitor and give quick feedback on daily life, especially tied to personal health.
5. Political awareness and action will be facilitated and more peaceful change and public uprisings like the Arab Spring will emerge. 
6.  The spread of the ‘Ubernet’ will diminish the meaning of borders, and new ‘nations’ of those with shared interests may emerge and exist beyond the capacity of current nation-states to control. 
7.  The Internet will become “the Internets” as access, systems, and principles are renegotiated
8. An Internet-enabled revolution in education will spread more opportunities, with less money spent on real estate and teachers.
9.  Dangerous divides between haves and have-nots may expand, resulting in resentment and possible violence.
10.   Abuses and abusers will ‘evolve and scale.’ Human nature isn’t changing; there’s laziness, bullying, stalking, stupidity, pornography, dirty tricks, crime, and those who practice them have new capacity to make life miserable for others.
11.  Pressured by these changes, governments and corporations will try to assert power -- and at times succeed – as they invoke security and cultural norms. 
12.  People will continue – sometimes grudgingly -- to make tradeoffs favoring convenience and perceived immediate gains over privacy; and privacy will be something only the upscale will enjoy.
13.  Humans and their current organizations may not respond quickly enough to challenges presented by complex networks.
14.  Most people are not yet noticing the profound changes today’s communications networks are already bringing about; these networks will be even more disruptive in the future. 
15.  Foresight and accurate predictions can make a difference; ‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’

I like the last one.  I think that the rest are also thought provoking.   Details about each of these predictions can be found in the full report - enjoy!

On latent data

I came across a post by EwanD from Microsoft entitled: “Latent Data” – the secret sauce of the Internet of Things. Since I am interested in both secret sauces and IoT, I was curious to understand what is this sauce. 

It seems that the term latent data refers to data that is typically not available, and also data that does not have any meaning on its own, and need to be aggregated, or joined with other data to be useful.  

Indeed IoT brings to the picture a lot of data that has not been available previously, and in my terminology, much of this data is about event that occur.   Sometimes the raw events are of interest, sometimes the interest is on derived events that are aggregation, transformation, or function that involve multiple events, and possibly also historical data and state information.   Note that when latent data becomes available it is not latent anymore,  and also that latent is a relative term, some piece of data can be available to somebody, and concealed from somebody else.     From this post one can learn what Microsoft sees its role in the IoT era, what I understood is that the role is twofold: both provider of OS for embedded systems, and as a cloud provider.   I am now trying to understand roles of different players in the IoT world, looking for sponsors for my recent activity.