Based on Joël de Rosnay's Chronicles on the Swiss Up website, made as predictions in the years 2002-2003, UP' Magazine proposes to retranscribe them here week by week, for a little reflection on the time that has passed. Was he right?
Objects will become "intelligent". They will communicate with each other, creating interactive environments in various places, home, office, hotels, warehouses, stores... This technological revolution will have a decisive impact on many areas of our daily lives.
It is based on the identification of each object, the remote interrogation of this identity and the wireless connection of these smart labels to the Internet to access databases. Companies will be able to track their products in real time from production and stock to delivery. Visitors to an exhibition will receive information on their "pocket PC" about the board or stand in front of which they are standing. The buyer of a large surface area will no longer have to wait in line for the products in his shopping trolley to be scanned one by one by a barcode reader: all the smart labels will be read in bulk and even through the packages at a distance of between 1.5 and 5 m.
Today 5 billion barcodes are scanned every day in 140 countries, making this technique the world's most important e-commerce tool, well ahead of e-commerce websites. But this supremacy is probably coming to an end with the arrival of RFID's, the "radio frequency identification systems" or "smart tags". These are tiny electronic chips (a few square millimetres) that act as transponders and can be placed in a wide variety of objects. With a 96-bit memory, they can be used to identify and describe the object and to obtain further detailed information by connecting to databases on the Internet. Trillions of trillions of different objects can be recognized in this way.
As an example, with only 54 bits we can individually identify each grain of rice consumed on the planet in one year! Implantable chips already exist, notably to identify spare parts, farm or laboratory animals, even pets, but their cost (around 1$) is far too high. Current RFId's production technologies, developed in particular by Motorola or Alien technology, make it possible to obtain the "tags" at a price of 10 cents and soon at 1 cent. Thanks to a technique of fluidic self-assembly (FSA), Alien will produce millions of tags per month as of June 2003 and 5 billion per year in 2005.
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Global companies have already joined the MIT Auto ID Center to study the multiple applications of RFIDs: Gillette, Wal Mart, Kraft, UPS, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Procter and Gamble, Sun, NCR... Their objective: to accelerate production chains, facilitate the supply chain, improve inventory management and distribution, promote recycling, and provide information to their customers' homes.
Soon, thanks to "smart tags", you will be able to locate a specific book in a second among the thousands of documents in your personal library. But you will no longer be able to take two incompatible medications out of your medicine cabinet without triggering an alarm, nor will you be able to wash in the same machine two pieces of clothing that could rub off on each other... These applications illustrate the positive aspects of RFID's use, but we will have to remain vigilant about the possible drifts of this technology, especially in the context of privacy breaches.
Chronicles by Joël de Rosnay on the Swiss Up website / Predictions 2002-2003 on Wifi, RFID, the future of Google, Grid computing, the student of the future.... (Crossroads of the Future)
To go further:
- "Intelligent objects, have you got a soul? : http://www.zdnet.fr/blogs/digiworld/vous-etes-deja-en-2020-objets-intelligents-avez-vous-donc-une-ame-39713210.htm
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