The IoT industry and majority of companies working in it are still very technology focused. However, understanding “the bigger picture” can sometimes be beneficial to make sense of what we are actively contributing with through our daily work. What we are building and the services we are providing are fuel for the Machine Society Evolution.

We have been talking about telematics, M2M, IoT and Global Connectivity for a long time but the maturity stage of the industry is still in it’s infancy. Children grow up very quickly and if you zoom out a little, the human race is also on its own growth path. The ability to speak, structure thoughts and draw conclusions has been a winning concept for the human race and its evolution since the beginning. With the emerging capabilities in IoT and communication, machines are now capable of starting their own evolution.

Machines were considered “stupid” before we connected them and gave them a voice to speak and communicate with through cellular networks. To enable products, devices, machines with ways of sending and receiving information – to connect them – is the basic foundation for making evolution possible. Add to that the capabilities to analyze the collected data and make informed automated decisions and you get the definition of what IoT is all about. Now, we have Smart Machines.

Looking at it in this context, it is fairly easy to follow how machines now can move from the ”hunter gatherer” stage to a more organized ”farmer”. As we humans found means of communicating with each other, capture and store information we were able to make more complex calculations and found smarter ways to draw quicker conclusions, we rapidly evolved through bronze and iron age toward an ever faster evolving modern society. We went from inventing flight in 1903 to landing a person on the moon in 1969. These steps could very much be symbolized with what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is contributing with to the machine evolution.

So, machines now have the basic means to start evolving and quickly become quite intelligent and make their own decisions with-in Narrow AI. However, those characteristics alone do not build a society. But try adding means for trading, a marketplace for transactions, an actual machine economy to this picture, and you will start seeing a society take form with more general AI.

The oldest coin is 2700 years old. Long before that, we traded items with symbolic values. The introduction of trade has shaped our human evolution from the beginning and is one of the most important and strongest driving forces for our human society. So introducing coins and tokens in the world of IoT should be a natural step in the evolution of machines, right? With, crypto currencies we are taking the first steps toward an IoT enabled connected machine economy.

One can argue pros and cons of the machine evolution, and it is understandable that we do so. However, evolution is something that cannot be stopped. Only influenced.

How do you think the future of globally connected IoT devices look like? We’re happy to chat about this. You can always reach us at marketing@simplexwireless.com or just drop us a note with this form.

Oscar Falkman, COO, Simplex Wireless