Why the Internet Needs Cognitive Protocols 156
An anonymous reader writes "We keep hearing that the 'Internet of Things' is coming – that day when we'll all have not just smart phones but also smart refrigerators, smart alarm clocks, and smart roads and bridges. A new article in IEEE Spectrum magazine makes the argument that this won't happen unless engineers do some serious rethinking of how the Internet's basic routing architecture works. The author, Anthony Liotta, offers some interesting solutions based on two networks in the human body: the autonomic nervous system and the cognitive brain."
Serious Rethinking (Score:4, Insightful)
Serious rethinking is what people who think they want smart toasters need to do.
I really don't feel the need to see every device under the sun attached to the internet. And I certainly don't want my car being tracked by smart roads and bridges. It's bad enough that they're already using license plate cameras to track us all.
Re:Obligatory Terminator reference (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sorry, nobody can tell me why I need these things. I know what is in my 'frig, I put it there. I don't need my stove connected to the net, nor my washing machine, etc.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this why he's a professor teaching networking and not a network engineer?
Re:Obligatory Terminator reference (Score:5, Insightful)
I want my fridge to know what I have so that I literally never have to think about buying food again. It tracks what I use an orders more. Someone drops it off at my door and I put it back in the fridge. I *can* do all of that manually, but there's no benefit to my participation so I'd rather have the free time and brain power to spend on something else. And the fridge can actually do it better than me, because it can look at use rates and determine if an order for more milk is required today or if it could wait until Thursday when I'll also be out of bread.
And that's just one example with one appliance; I could sit here all day and name more. It's fine if you don't want to do those things, but it's ridiculous to pretend that no benefits exists, and that no one else is interested. Your lack of imagination and/or interest does not define society.
Re:Obligatory Terminator reference (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would I let my appliance choose my grocery provider?
Because, based on current tech trends, it will be totally locked down and unable to order from anyone else? Or, at least, it will take a 30% cut of everything you buy.
Re:Obligatory Terminator reference (Score:5, Insightful)
Semantic protocols are a total joke (Score:2, Insightful)
What is this? The 1980s again. Didn't the failure of 'semantic' OSes and file-systems teach anything? Semantics should be imposed top down by 'applications', NEVER bottom-up.
The worst aspect of modern Computer Science is how applications are discouraged to the point of being BANNED from informing the underlying OS and resource managers exactly what use of resources would be optimal to the application. Instead, the underlying layers- following the same cretinous logic as this article- have to pretend they are 'psychic' and second guess the needs of any running application.
Trust the system memory-manager, you are told. Trust the OS scheduler. And yet, only the application can truly know how and why it needs to use the memory and CPU processing resources.
There is NO SUCH THING as AI. There is Human intelligence, and the rule sets Humans program into computer applications. So-called AI is nothing more than specific uses of Human derived rule-sets. An NO, having a Human rule-set cause an algorithm to search for specific rule patterns in a database does NOT constitute true AI either.
This does not mean there cannot be algorithmic improvements in the routing of Internet traffic- of course all systems tend to have room for improvement. But dribbled 'ideas' along the lines of "copy the brain- it 'thinks' so that's the ultimate solution" were cretinous in the 1950s, and are just as cretinous today.
PS the PS4 console from Sony, released later this year, allows as much 'to the metal' coding as possible, where the applications (ie., games) DO get to tell the underlying systems exactly how to behave. Top down semantics will allow this hardware to still be competitive in 5+ years time. The 'second guess the user' bottom up pseudo 'AI' semantics that will be controlling memory and thread scheduling on our ordinary computer devices in the same time period will need many times the computer power to even draw equal in performance.
Likewise, at the lowest level, a network should be clean, simple, elegant and neutral. Moronic hacky low level gimmicks designed to target whatever data flow is currently 'trendy' would ruin the network, but for obvious reasons there will always be morons who lack any understanding of the layer model, and propose such changes. Packets should NEVER care what kind of data they are carrying. The rules that control 'frequency' and 'priority' should come from semantically aware higher levels. Higher levels that never need to change the underlying physical design of the network in order to change how the network functions.
The physical aspect of a net should be entirely concerned with more packets at more speed with more reliability. Mechanical syntactical concepts only. And this, of course, is the current state of the Internet There is no value, despite the idiot claims of the author, in choosing to move certain packets 'slowly' (such packets should be issued slowly at higher layers, obviously). And as for bandwidth stealing packets like video, well only the improvement of total network bandwidth can help here, obviously.