Global Connectivity is Creating an Age of Abundant Knowledge and an End to Privacy

July 30, 2018 – In the latest missive from Peter Diamandis he describes an approaching era of abundant knowledge when we will be able to know anything we want, anywhere we want, and anytime we want. He describes it as an age of radical transparency created by 50 billion connected devices generating over 600 zettabytes of information. All of this will happen in a mere two years from now.

How? A global network of connectivity from drones, satellites, devices, and sensors are creating an Internet of Everything. Diamandis describes the four different levels in this evolution:

1. Satellite imaging the Earth in meter-resolution
2. A sky full of drones imaging everything in centimeter-resolution
3. Autonomous vehicles sensing our streets in sub-millimeter-resolution
4. A future of Augmented Reality Glasses imaging everything before us

As always feel free to share your comments.

Satellite Imaging and Orbital IoT

This is the coming age of microsatellite constellations brought to you by SpaceX and OneWeb.

OneWeb is working on almost 900 satellites, while SpaceX will be deploying over 12,000 mini-fridge-sized ones. Both have plans to create a global 5G Internet, but that represents only a fraction of the potential of what similar deployments will bring: microsatellite equipped with high-resolution cameras will extend the Internet of Things (IoT), providing a massive amount of data to help solve the world’s grand challenges.

As of August 2017, there were nearly 1,800 operational satellites in orbit. Of these, 742 were communications satellites, 596 were used for Earth observation, and 108 were used for navigation. And a massive increase in operational satellites is on the way at they become smaller and as launch costs plummet. Today private companies all over the world are building satellite technology. Chinese companies plan to place 60 commercial high-resolution Jilin 1 imaging satellites in orbit by 2020. Planet Labs, a disruptive company that uses milk-carton sized imaging satellites to help industries obtain game-changing data, is showcasing over 175 satellites in orbit that can image anywhere on the globe with up to 3.72-meter resolution. The company is also offering a specialized, targeted satellite option called SkySats. Thirteen of these can achieve up to 72-centimeter resolution. The SkySats can also capture video, which can be used to extrapolate 3D models. These satellites are built using the same technology Google deployed to capture crisp 3D-image views for its Google Maps.

A Sky Full of Drones

Closer to Earth’s surface, a few hundred feet above our heads, we’re developing an extensive network of autonomous drones to collect valuable information for farmers, wind turbine surveyors, financial institutions, and many others. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced that over 1 million drones were registered with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). By 2020, the FAA predicts 7 million drones will be flying in North American skies. While private and commercial drone flight rules remain moderately restrictive, this past October, the U.S. announced plans for the federal government to work with companies to start deploying large fleets of drones with more relaxed restrictions.

During 2017 drone data collection was invaluable for saving lives in natural disasters (hurricanes and wildfires), surveying damage and providing search and rescue operations with crucial footage of hard-to-reach locations. And as drones fly more and collect more data, a small fleet will easily generate up to 100 terabytes of data per day.

Autonomous Vehicles Seeing Everything

Intel predicts that the self-driving car industry will grow to $7 trillion by 2050. On the ground the arrival of these vehicles will represent a data collection revolution as they image and sample their surroundings all the time. Imagine millions of autonomous vehicles on streets, each packed with dozens of cameras, LiDAR and radar to help them navigate. Waymo, one of the leaders in developing this technology, uses three different LiDAR sensors, five radar sensors, and eight optical cameras. The sensor suites on a single car generate more than 4 terabytes of data per day. Just one technology, LiDAR, a laser detection system that bounces its light beams off surrounding objects can create up to 9 million data points per second according to market leader Velodyne.

Tesla, unlike Waymo, avoids using LiDAR altogether, and instead opts for an ultrasonic, radar and camera approach to autonomous vehicles. Here’s a description from Tesla about the sensors on each of their cars:

“Eight surround cameras provide 360 degrees of visibility around the car at up to 250 meters of range. Twelve updated ultrasonic sensors complement this vision, allowing for detection of both hard and soft objects at nearly twice the distance of the prior system. A forward-facing radar with enhanced processing provides additional data about the world on a redundant wavelength that is able to see through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead.”

The bottom line is this: when we enter the era of autonomous cars, there will never be a car, pedestrian, accident, or street-side pick-pocket that isn’t being imaged. These cars will record an extraordinary number of images in detail.

Augmented Reality Headsets

And then there is augmented reality. While the world now has more mobile phones than humans with smartphone numbers alone reaching 3.5 billion by 2021, we will soon see the emergence of augmented reality (AR) headsets. AR glasses will feature a multitude of forward-looking cameras that image everything at a sub-millimeter resolution as you travel through the day. And by the end of 2020 these AR glasses, and smartphones, plus medical wearables and smart dust will amount to 50 billion connected devices hosting more than a trillion sensors.

There has been an exponential growth in the number of sensors per connected device over the last decade. Sensors on phones have doubled every four years. This means expect to see 160 per mobile device by 2027, and a world jam-packed with nearly 100 trillion in total. And almost every one of these sensors will be accessible to artificial intelligence delivered over the Internet or in specific devices.

I can envision waking up in the morning, putting on my augmented reality contact lenses, and forgetting about them for the rest of the day while they record every conversation, every person crossing the street, and everything I look at. Drawing from this constant stream of observational data, I’ll be able to train my social graph and preferences into my AI using the collected data.

A Final Thought – It’s Your Questions that will Matter Most

The bottom line is we are heading towards a future where you can know anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want. In this future, it’s not “what you know,” but rather “the quality of the questions you ask” that will be most important.

If you are in the fashion business and want to know the average spectral color of women’s blouses on Madison Avenue this morning, ask your AI and it will gather the image data and provide an accurate answer in seconds. Then you can ask the AI if any recent advertising campaign correlates to blouse colour choices.

Such abundance of data is what I call “Radical Transparency” and it leads to a few interesting conclusions, which will no doubt be the topic of a future posting.

In the world of IoT and 1oo trillion sensors privacy as we have known it will truly be a thing of the past.

And it will be harder and harder to do anything in secret without leaving a traceable digital record.