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Brian Gilmore is the director of product management at InfluxData.
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The first two years of the decade have been challenging. Technology came through for us when it counted. The decades-worth of digital transformation we have packed into the past 20 months were contributed by the internet of things and analytics-driven workforce transformation.
Part of the acceleration can be attributed to the sudden emergence of use cases. The purpose of use cases for readers outside the tech and software industries is to intercept inventions. We build with use cases in mind, but it is often only later that our work's true impact hits home with customers. Silly Putty is an example of this. Listerine was supposed to clean the floor.
Consider the brand, now a household name. Group HD video calls on Facebook were promised in early 2012. The business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) web conferencing solution, with less than 100 million daily meeting participants, sat squarely in the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2 By April 2020, this had grown to over 300 million daily users. Many of the new users were business users working from home, while others were looking for a better digital connection with friends and family.
We should keep in mind the future of smart cities. 3D-printed buildings and traffic control for flying cars are still fiction. The future of smart cities will be enabled by technologies available today.
There are three technology trends that are likely to power the smart cities of the future.
Peer-to-Peer networks are peer-to-Peer networks.
Peer-to-Peer networks have been a part of the technology landscape for more than 30 years. Today's innovations in p2p, such as Protocol Labs' libp2p, power chat, web pages, apps, and databases, are usually and ideally without a central authority. This capability could allow citizens to self-organize in a bottom-up manner in communities. The government will contribute as a participant and equal peer in the creation and delivery of peer-to-peer services.
Public transportation, access to fresh food, healthcare, energy, elder-care, journalism, and beyond could all be transformed by p2p-based distributed apps. The smart communities trend will be built by wise leaders. They may end up on the wrong internet.
Recommendation engines.
Our social media feeds, music and film consumption, and online purchases are driven by recommendation engines and the filters that power them. They will likely be in charge of a lot of our interactions with local and municipal government resources and services in the future.
In a p2p-powered smart community where we fully control access to our data and its usage, we will opt in to services that use our digital fingerprints to engage us with services specific to our needs. Social, health, financial, and beyond, all government services could be proactive and turn today's painful DMV experience into tomorrow's simple text message exchange.
There is smart technology through distributed ledgers.
Suppose you have a main exposure to the technology through cryptocurrencies. The fit may not be obvious. It has nothing to do with finance and everything to do with trust.
The underlying record of transactions in a distributed financial model such as the one used by Bitcoin, and even meme-coins like doge, is known as the first use case of the DLT. If we consider the underlying traits of the technology, there are far more use cases for it.
All parties need to trust the database owner to keep the database secure and anonymous. In the context of smart cities, recommendation engines, and peer-to-peer networks, third-party trust is critical. All participants in the content will be equal contributors, auditors, and inspectors. You will have deleted access to your personal records and keys to share with whom you would like within the smart city ecosystem. A smart city based on DLT is a democracy of technology, where we all share ownership of our communities with the leaders and services we rely on.
What is stopping us?
The successful implementation of smart cities balances people, processes, and technology. We are usually good at that last one. We are a long way from fully integrating the technologies described above. Smart city investments may be just as important to an equal and just society as education and access to fresh water and Sanitation are. Maintenance of this digital infrastructure like we do our roads and bridges must also be considered. Construction is one thing, but upkeep is another.
Brian Gilmore is the director of product management at InfluxData. He has spent the last decade working with organizations around the world to drive the unification of industrial and enterprise internet of things with machine learning, cloud, and other transformational technology trends.
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