The Cutting Edge: Accelerating Returns in IoT.
The Internet of Thing’s potential in the 5G era.
Moore’s Law
On April 19th, 1965, Gordon Moore made a prediction that would drastically reshape how futurists would view the evolution of technology. He predicted a steady increase in integrated circuit density as a function of time that would later become commonly known as Moore’s Law. He stated that the number of components on a dense integrated circuit would increase two-fold every year until at least 1975.
Moore eventually revised this prediction in 1975 by adjusting the doubling effect’s time frame to every 2 years. With this adjustment, Moore catalyzed a fundamental paradigm shift in how people assessed the development of technology growth. His assessment on dense integrated circuits became the leaping-off point for a considerable amount of technological development and growth, not just for microprocessors, but across the entire spectra of technology. The doubling relationship that he predicted soon found replications across a litany of industries, with laws and rules covering scaling effects in energy, lighting, telecommunications, and data to name a few.
The Law of Accelerating Returns
As more researchers identified similar patterns to Moore’s Law, the ubiquitous nature of the exponential growth relationship became significantly more apparent. In 1999, Ray Kurzweil presented a grander scope for the theory in his book The Age of the Spiritual Machines, which argued that the acceleration effect existed across all technology and life, and was very quickly leading to a series of massive paradigm shifts. His position, The Law of Accelerating Returns, wasn’t limited to individual technologies experiencing the same growth pattern as Moore’s Law, but instead that everything operated in this manner, including how rapidly change would happen.
The proof for this relationship is validated by the wide spectra of dynamic industries and systems that have fundamentally altered the human experience, but some think the evidence is hindered by concerns of resource limitations. Considering this clear pattern of growth, it’s apparent that the future of technology will require systems to integrate, providing new evolutionary pathways to expand out of. The incorporation of the internet into useful edge devices, which created the Internet of Things (IoT), is an example of this system integration. Several years after the Internet of Things was born, the market experienced a massive shift in its capacity as data shifted to the cloud model, catalyzing the current expansion in IoT capacity.
Shifting the Paradigm
With Moore and Kurzweil’s predictions in the front of mind, it is worth examining what impact new technology developments are having on the rapidly expanding IoT Marketplace. In their 2020 Internet of Things (IoT) Global Market Forecast, Verified Market Research predicted a growth relationship for the marketplace to increase from $212 Billion in 2018 to $1.3 Trillion in 2026, carrying a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over 25%. One of the biggest drivers behind this growth is the integration of 5G networks into IoT deployments. With higher speeds, lower latency, and the potential for 5G network powered edge devices, the future of edge device deployments across this incredible network infrastructure comes with a massive shift in capacity, performance, and output.
Looking to the future, The Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA) identified several market segments that were likely to be heavily affected by the introduction of 5G in their 2019 report, Internet of Things in the 5G Era. The key segments they identified as being potentially disrupted by 5G integration were smart cities, automobiles, healthcare, manufacturing, and utilities. By increasing the connectivity of massive sections of the IoT marketplace, 5G network infrastructure is facilitating a major step forward in the evolution of the connected future. This step forward can simply be expressed with the following relationship:
“As connectivity increases, fragmentation decreases.”
With how much systemic complexity exists within the IoT marketplace, increasing the connectivity and capacity through large-scale technology upgrades like 5G networks provides clear pathways for long-term sector growth. One of the critical aspects required for holistic market de-fragmentation like this to occur is system-level unification. This unification can be accomplished slowly with manual realignments, such as wide-scale network infrastructure improvements, but down the road, the much faster approach will be to integrate machine learning and artificial intelligence into the process. The incorporation of these tools adds an extra layer of intelligence to the unification process and establishes the ground layer of a truly autonomous internet of the future.
Optimized Applications
With this goal in mind, it’s worthwhile to examine how key components of the future internet are developing. With the rapid development of both edge devices and infrastructure, connectivity has become available in a much larger capacity. Smart cities have been establishing strong foundations in critical hubs across the planet, and they are primed for incredible growth through the capacity of 5G networks. Connected healthcare is establishing a new era of medical technology that centers around data-driven decision-making to expand the quality and length of life. Smart sensors reduce energy waste through dynamic machine learning analysis of consumption.
All of these changes contribute to the dynamic development of the IoT marketplace and challenge their respective system’s status quo. By increasing the total connectivity of the marketplace, and reducing the amount of inherent system-level interference, the Internet of Things can validate Gordon Moore and Ray Kurzweil’s predictions. This new era of technological innovation has the potential to circumvent the resource limitations that inhibit progressive evolution, and define a new standard of connectivity and utility.
