Читать книгу Standing on the Sun - Christopher Meyer - Страница 15

The advent of a new Internet of things is a third, fundamentally important change in capitalism's environment. Using a combination of miniature connected sensors and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, inanimate objects become collectors and transmitters of data. If you put the right kind of sensor on a bridge, for example, it can detect movement that falls outside acceptable parameters and is therefore a sign of deterioration. If you give it the ability to transmit that data to the Internet, the need for maintenance can be spotted by engineers remotely. As we explore in chapter 3, that ubiquitous sensing capability changes the rules for capitalists because it makes the effects of their activities visible to the broader society. Impacts they used to think of as externalities become increasingly measurable and attributable.

If capital is defined by ownership and markets, it seems technology is changing both. Already 5 billion of the world's 6.9 billion people have cell phones. The next generation of IT will be cheaper again.¹⁴ So markets will become much more connected, arbitrage more challenging, bottlenecks more difficult to create. We've seen this in the case of labor markets, where connectivity has shifted demand for everything from radiologists to call center operators from the United States to India.

And for some people, IT will take much of the need for capital out of capitalism. More efficient use of equipment, pay-by-the-seat information systems, access to intellectual capital that used to be a corporate asset—all these trends favor and empower the small business and individual. It appears that the revolution is finally arriving—and it's profitable!

And back to poor Jack Ablin, our Chicago investor. Happily he's not poor any more: P&G recovered fully from its share-price tumble. But the rollercoaster ride he took is another property of the new world. Its intense interconnection makes for unpredictable volatility. It creates the preconditions for an explosion of innovation, and that's what we expect. But it also creates the risk of other kinds of cascades, some of them potentially catastrophic. The cascading power blackouts in the northeast United States in 1965 and the one-day Dow Jones Industrial Average loss of 23 percent in 1987 were both the results of connected system components (in one case circuit breakers, in the other programmed trading instructions). The Internet of things, meanwhile, is an ideal host for an Ebola-strength computer virus planning its leap from the information world to the physical one. This book isn't about that—but don't say we didn't warn you.