The Sensor-Rich, Data-Scooping Future

This sensor explosion is only starting: Huawei, a Chinese maker of computing and communications equipment with $47 billion in revenue, estimates that by 2025 over 100 billion things, including smartphones, vehicles, appliances and industrial equipment, will be connected to cloud computing systems. The Internet will be almost fused with the physical world. The way Google now looks at online clicks to figure out what ad to next put in front of you will become the way companies gain once-hidden insights into the patterns of nature and society. General Electric, Google and others expect that knowing and manipulating these patterns is the heart of a new era of global efficiency, centered on machines that learn and predict what is likely to happen next.

“The core thing Google is doing is machine learning,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman. Sensor-rich self-driving cars, connected thermostats or wearable computers, he said, are part of Google’s plan “to do things that are likely to be big in five to 10 years. It just seems like automation and artificial intelligence makes people more productive, and smarter.” The great data science companies of our sensor-packed world will have experts in arcane reaches of statistics, computer science, networking, visualization and database systems, among other fields. Graduates in those areas are already in high demand. Does this mean that the computing tools that were supposed to empower us all will simply make the wealthiest companies even wealthier? Michael Chui, a partner at McKinsey Global Institute thinks that much analysis, like aerospace or agriculture, will also require specialist knowledge of what the critical data means, and how new patterns can be exploited. “The tools will get better, and that will raise the bar, but you will still need domain knowledge,” he said. It is of course possible that both things are true: Big companies like Google and Amazon will have lots of commodity data analysis, and specialists will find niches. That means for most of us, the answer to the future will be in knowing how to ask the right kinds of questions.