Internet of Actions
I know a lot of people who put their passion into creating an Internet of Things. I'm sure they, like other passionate people, will take actions that lead to the creation of great novelties. But still: a while ago, I put this out there: "Life is full of things. Internet is filling up life. Why do we need an Internet of Things #IoT? Why don't we create the Internet of Actions #IoA?"
My quarrel is not with people passionate about creating stuff in the field of IoT, but rather with those who jump on trends like this one at the expense of keeping an open mind. So I want to just plant a seed that maybe opens minds to listen to more 'human sciences' ideas. Because at this time it feels to me that technology is mainly focused on engineering & entertainment.
My field is that of learning. We are all almost continuously in learning (or teaching; the border between them is pretty thin) activities. Almost every action we take is one by which we learn, or prove we have learned - or teach, or assess whether someone is capable. Fortunately, we don't need a lot of extrinsic motivation to do this. The reward for these actions is to help, and to be helped. Unfortunately, most of these actions leave no traces outside of the people who are involved in it. This means that we may, for instance, have proven many times that we are experts in something but once we "go global" we either have to "prove it again" in a scholarly way or need to go through a painful process of getting our "credentials" accepted.
Well .. why not create an Internet of Actions where these very human things are leveraged in a very human way. I am sure IoT will deliver some fine things we wouldn't want to miss once we get used to hem. That said, I am positively certain that any little bit of IoA will scale much, much more toward our collective learning.
I hope I can be accused of not saying anything new ;-) I know there is a lot of good IoA stuff around already (my trophy of the day goes to Jira/Atlassian). I just hope to have contributed to getting one or two people interested in wanting more than wiki's, code repositories, ...
A more polemical version of this can be found here.
Assistant Professor and postdoctoral researcher
10 年Hey Bill, Nice to hear from you. Now I have comments from 3 continents, not too bad for a first post here ;-) On your comment: exactly! The key thing is that credentials and practice are to a large extent divorced now - as are credentials and state of the art in any more or less developing field. The curricula cannot keep up with the reality of actions and developments. An Internet of Actions will leverage technology to create a context which is adaptive to those realities (your actual experience which is as "actual" is suggesting, based in action as well as the actually relevant credentials like being able to use latest construction/surgery equipment). JoB
Founder CEO at MaiTyme
10 年Jo, A very intriguing post! If faced with any operation that may have a critical outcome... (Surgery, Air Travel, Construction for example) who would you prefer to carry out the action? Someone who has studied the how and is merely credentialed or someone who has done it many times before either through apprenticeship, simulation, or actual experience? I for one prefer the experienced person over the one who just looked it up. Bill
Assistant Professor and postdoctoral researcher
10 年Christophe, Good to hear from you, I hope you're doing all right. Thanks for liking (if the trend is confirmed I might post more ;-). No, I didn't mean this in a serious, metaphysical way. It's part irony with respect to the Gartner hype curve thing and part concern that money is chasing things, rather than what people do with them. I should indeed explain what I mean a little more, maybe a next time. Still, do not worry about IoA (as I mean it) being about wearable underwear recording what is better kept unrecorded. I mean that if you take a meaningful action (like talking in this way) that you can put this 'brick' into a type of building of interest to others (I guess this was even more philosophical, but - as said - maybe a next time). JoB
Hi Jo, I like your thought-provoking posts. Now, since people had serious difficulties to agree on what a "thing" is or isn't, probably the same would apply to "actions" ! I believe that both concepts have a high "utopia-factor", meaning that there is an "ideal", almost philosophical part of it, and then the back-to-earth developments of technologies that make it happen, with evolution along a S-curve or a hype curve. In your post, IoA looks a bit like a hyper-twitter (recording of what people did). This would look even more scary or big-brotherish to me than IoT ! So could you clarify in your words, what is (and isn't) an "action" ? Thanks.
Assistant Professor and postdoctoral researcher
10 年Thanks, Naveed, you're right of course: it's seldom a matter of either/or. But from time to time a little bit of provoking helps thoughts to come out. You're also too kind. I don't know whether I can live up to expectations though.