“When everything becomes linked with everything else, matter becomes mind” – Erik Davis.
Our world today is extending intelligent sensors into everything, into everyday objects and technologies that we use. These sensors will be endowed with the ability to give us feed-backs, making this world a much smarter and better-connected place. The notion of the Internet of things refers to the possibility of empowering everyday objects with the capability to identify themselves, communicate with other objects and possibly compute.
Think about a world that is intelligent, responsive, and anticipates all our needs making our lives much simpler and stress-free. For example, there are smart homes & hotels now: where you walk into a room, and the room knows how you like the lighting, automatically plays your favorite song, opens the curtains by itself, and sets the temperature according to the weather outside. The adequate burgeoning of such technologies will essentially blur the distinction between self and the world, and guess what? The world will have a mind within itself.
It’s how the cognitive philosophers David Chalmers and Andy Clark said, “We humans have indeed always been adept at dovetailing our minds and skills to the shape of our current tools and aids. But when those tools and aids start dovetailing back — when our technologies actively, automatically, and continually tailor themselves to us, just as we do to them — then the line between tool and user becomes flimsy indeed.” What it means is that the human race has always been skilled in corresponding our minds to our tools, but when the tools talk back to us, the loop will be finished, and we would have fully expanded our minds allowing the insentient objects or things to merge with our lives.
This is the Internet of things, and it is far bigger and growing faster than anyone realizes.