IoT, Digital Twins, and the Future of Policymaking: A Conversation with Rob van Kranenburg
Why do you need this data? We don't care. , which is one more data against an argument like that, you cannot win if that's the argument, if they're going to put tags and sensors everywhere, because. This is, what they, what they want. They don't care about the why, they just want more, more of it.
the whole system starts to be corrupted at some point or another, however beautiful it is conceived This is powerful topic. I would really love to, I want to show you my conversation with Rob Van Kranenburg, as we covered a number of interesting topics, starting from the origins of the digital twin concept, its first implementation, how that implementation evolved over the years, where we are right now, and what we expect will happen in the not so distant future. But more importantly, we talked about the risks and challenges of our modern interconnected society and how the Internet of Things technology can be used for good.
And not so good purpose. I do believe that this is the right time to start that conversation. So please listen to this episode and share your feedback with me. Let's start with a brief introduction you do something very, very important, not necessarily only for technical standpoint, but also from the policymaking. So maybe could you give us a bit background of what you're doing and get from there.
Yes. So my background is is indeed, is not the technical. So I studied the languages and literature. And when I was doing that, going to university in Holland and Tilburg, I basically wanted to do the least useful thing possible sort of, but I thought, well, the least useful thing possible, at least at this moment in time, would be literature. So, I thought I hope I can stay in literature for the rest of my life and and, and be happy with that.
But this, of course, was in the 80s. And there were fax machines all of a sudden, which, which you could look at libraries in other countries. And there were things like Dreamweaver. Where you could build websites and hypertext environments. And before I knew it or we knew it, we were all building websites or building hypertext environments. And for us, this was very liberatory because we were able to click out of these environments that were, we were able to click out of the book, which was this solid, sealed object.
There was no real base for solid understanding. Everything was a construct. And, and, and all of a sudden, this hypertext fueled that idea. So I started working in Amsterdam and teaching in a very small computer department in the film and television studies.
And also working at a another place in Amsterdam called Bali, which I was working on media education. And then I went to a conference in Jönköping in Sweden. And that's where I saw And, and heard for the first time about pervasive computing and ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence. And this was a program called the disappearing computer. And so I saw a group of researchers of about 300 people, very diverse, but they were, they all seemed very enthusiastic. about creating this kind of world that would overlay the real world.
It, they would, they were going to describe characteristics of objects and people and things. And they were going to to tag them and they were going to write. Information about them and and they were going to put them in a, in a, in a database and they were basically going to deconstruct or dissect all these.
objects in in, in different ways. To me, coming from literature, I was really shocked and upset because I was looking at a whole group of quite influential researchers with also quite a background, it seemed, because the, the history of, what came to be known as Internet of Things around 1999 2000 goes back to the 50s to predictive maintenance in, in, in factories and the local area networks and everything that is now called edge computing was edge computing at that moment in time, because they were doing all this collecting information and, and analysis of the information and trying to get feedback back to Operations and machines in a local environment. I was quite shocked because well, coming from literature or poetry and there's, there's, there's quite some people who who are animists on the planet millions of them, if not, if not billions, I don't know, maybe billions, but, but let's say hundreds of millions. And they have very, very, very personal relationships with objects and and also, for example, the whole notion of religion or of making things holy is, is, is something that humans do with objects and, and sort of, they create these relationships. And so, I thought if at some point, all of these things are going to be tagged, and at some point they're going to be read out.
There will be a dominant interpretation of the relationship with that object. And and I was wondering then, who was writing this? Because nobody could tell me who was actually writing the data in the databases that you would be shown if you actually were able to read out something. And I assumed then it would be the companies who were building the products, which, which was which was something that, that there was very little thought about. And there was also no thought about the governance of, of, of the system. And this is what we basically see now.
There was also no idea that if you, if you create A kind of large set of such databases. At some point you also create a kind of vision coming from those databases. And it's like like being in kind of an autistic world.
For some people, a green toothbrush is something very different from a red toothbrush. It's like another object. So it's, it's something that is just not resembling the object. object toothbrush.
It's something different. So at some point you could, you can imagine, and this is, I think what we see now happening with, with all of the AI sort of coming in this is that, is that the gaze from the network might start scripting, for example, things that are read. And, and as they are scripting things that are read they, the, the fact that, that some of these things are alive or not alive may actually not be that, may not be that relevant because for the gays sort of, it's, it's all about the similarity of certain of certain things. And I don't know. How or why, but I, I kind of saw all this in a flash and I thought I got to stay very close to this group of people because it's, it's very interesting and, and it's, it's hard to be, it's basically impossible to oppose this because this will be the new, the new normal at some point. And that's what it became.
It became. Became the new normal and and, and ever since I've been wondering how can we put this this new normal to the best possible use for the most possible people because it's, it's clearly something that's, that's growing out of Also a scientific need and an engineering need and a maker's need. It's not going to be stopped by regulation or rules or it's not going to be stopped by power or in any kind of way.
It's, it's it's clear that across the planet, this digitization of, of things, of people, of objects, of is is, is the, is the dominant paradigm. I think that's very accurate. Description of the origins of digital twins and other topics that we're going to, to talk today and you looking at it from kind of the outside, right? Because literature is not very close with technology, at least in, in, in my mind, right? And that gives you that unique perspective that you can see things that are not that obvious for someone that is deeply inside technology. And I think that's a great contribution and actually your contribution is, is your book about the, the policymaking in the age of digital twins. You described the digital twins origins.
So maybe before we go to the book and to the policymaking, could you share your perspective on how digital twin evolved from those very early stages? You said like database type of digital twins into the modern days. yeah again, I go a little bit back to my background, which is in literature. And then there's the notion of the doppelganger of the double that's that's, that's also a notion from, from Freud.
And Freud also, also talks about the uncanny, which is And that's, that's basically when you meet something that is, that is real, real close to something that you recognize, but actually is not fully. So this, you don't feel very, you don't feel comfortable, but you don't know why. And I think this notion of the digital twin has always been deeply embedded in the, the, in the notion of pervasive computing or ubiquitous computing. I think it's only later that it became a goal, but it was always embedded in a vision of ubiquitous computing and the internet of things. So at some point you can understand it as kind of a total or a full virtualization of an object or of a person.
Becomes more because it's, it starts to basically act on itself. And the idea is that it's going to start acting by itself. And this is, for example seen in some of the factories where where, where you have an actual machine and you have a digital, digital twin of the machine. And they are powered by, by energy.
And it's possible to switch the the energy flow from the actual real machine to the virtual machine. And, and, and everything stays stable. Sometimes I think we're going backwards to this entire situation because it's moving so fast. seems as if we have already been here at some times because, because the, the, the, the technologies are are so aligned at, at this, at this moment in time. There's very little. would say real debate in, in circles of, of engineering about the basics of things.
People are working on 6g. People are working on security. People are working on quantum. People are working on better sensors and refining sensor qualities in, in, in IOT. But there's not.
Like maybe in other centuries where you would have real fights between scientists or engineering groups who said, we want this, so we want that. It's a, there's a huge Alignment across the planet that what we're sort of doing now is creating and using the data that we've gathered from the sensors and from people and from machines. Into really large, actionable databases or actual, actual data lakes that can be worked on. By ever more sophisticated machine learning and then now creating this AI situation all across the planet, all across the planet.
It boils down to the, the crazy and beautiful TCP IP protocol of of, of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. Who basically said in the 70s, we need a protocol in the world that just says pass on the packet. We don't need any type of control of people. We don't need any type of policing. We don't need any gatekeeper.
We, we just need, need to go like wildfire across the planet and say pass on the packet. And this is what the Internet protocol was pass on the packet. I mean, it's.
Looking at the way the, in, in the world, it, it may have been something alien, sort of, it, it could have come straight from aliens, I mean, if you, if you think about it, or if you want to think about it, because it never happened in, on the planet, that we would have such a, such a global protocol that, that nobody could really, that would be strange. control and, and that, that was, was so so pervasive. And this is the basis for why, why we had had internet of things and why we now have, have AI across the planet And so I think we were in a, very strange situation in which, which in under 50 years. Because I think the web is 1993 and then the protocol was 10 years, 15 years earlier.
And, and now with, with this, with all of the things that are going on it's just, just incredible. It's, it's really incredible how, how, how all of this has come to, to to pass. Yeah. Let me summarize what you just said for the audience, because you mentioned a few extremely important topics.
And I want to be sure that even for people with less experience, those are very obvious. So first of all, I've got huge respect for professionals like you that, all I've got hands on experience number of years of actually working and thinking about those solutions because on LinkedIn and everywhere, like digital twin currently is just a fancy 3d animation, right? But as you said That cannot be harder for the truth. Digital twin is a data structure with the metadata and actual sensor readings and logic that can act on top of the data to simulate future state or potential state. And to take some actions. So this is essentially the digital twin and you perfectly explain it piece by piece and the evolution, like how we get there from the, let's say, kind of static data structure, adding telemetry.
And later on we are that logic. And as you said, AI is just, a tool or feature, if you will, of the digital twin concept, it doesn't change anything, right? It actually perfectly fits into digital twin itself, which is from my perspective extremely interesting that you've got that concept that is pretty old, but stays relevant. And with those new. AI advancements is even more relevant than it used to be a few years ago.
And the other thing that you mentioned, which is crucial is the open protocol. Because when I think about, internet of things, I think about the ecosystem of devices, exchanging data. In order to deliver some business value, right? And that business value is the goal of the whole ecosystem. And without the protocol, as you said, that won't be possible to implement type of scenario.
Yes. Ab absolutely. The book was invented by Gutenberg and was 1452. And and.
And we all learn to read at some point, and we learn to read and write, or I hope we all did, because it's sometimes difficult for people to do, but let's hope everybody is able to do it. And then the first public library in Netherlands was 1918. So, 1452. The possibility to read 1918, the first library. Of course, there were other libraries at, at universities, but you still had to go to university.
But for simple, simple people like us, for the common people, we had, we, I mean, we, we, we, if we ask, can I read a book in 1800 they put you in jail because you're not supposed to, to read a book. That was the beauty of the internet protocol. It's the same kind of huge presence like the book, but it got rid of all the gatekeepers that's brilliant and beautiful, but it, it had some side effects and because the book like 400 years for a public library that takes too long, but in a, in a hundred years, 150 years, they built schools and there were some teachers and they built universities and they built Sort of kind of formats of doing things well . But with, with the internet, we got nothing, sort of, it just was there. And that was, at the moment, we see the, the problems that arose, because because it if we have these three regions, the Chinese, the European, and, and America it, it hit the American region. In the notion of this entrepreneurial spirit, so we now have 7 trillion in the hands of 10 individuals, which is, which is, I mean, even not looking at what's happening at the moment in America, just looking at the US government. The, the wave of connectivity went through the individuals in China with with the party and with the the, the politicians being engineers. So in 2010 out of 12, top politicians nine were engineers and scientists.
So they understood if we do deep packet inspection, we build our bubble. And within our bubble, we control everything. We do infrastructure, services, applications.
And the problem there is. It, although it's, I think it's, it's it was brilliantly done and I think. We, we all should do it. I mean, if, if we are in regions where we pay taxes, so that's where the infrastructure should also be.
And the services should be there and the application should be there. And they should be in a bubble where the money doesn't go to a few shareholders, but stays within the public's sphere where we can just re invests all that money. And of course the problem with China is that it was a good, response, but there's too much distrust in the system.
So it's really obsessive compulsive on, on control. So this means that in the long run, it, it cannot be really stable because, because you create all this distrust, people will not give real information and so, so the whole system starts to be corrupted at some point or another, however beautiful it is conceived. And in Europe, it went through the people that are basically our leaders, and they're lawyers.
And what they do is they write laws, . I mean, it's, it's, and they did brilliant things by, keeping Europe together in the, in the, in the past decades. And before that, we just had wars all the time with all these countries. So it was brilliant, brilliantly done.
But they couldn't understand what was happening because they had this kind of legal mindset. And if you have this legal mindset, you, you basically do not understand ontological change, or you do not understand. Real paradigm shifts. You just keep thinking, Oh, it's going to be fine. I'll be able to, to add another.
So that's where we basically are now is that no region has had a real good, proper response to this wave of connectivity. And and I think it's also because because worldwide the engineers themselves, the scientists, the builders, the makers. They they were very busy making and that's, that's logical.
But they also sort of did not want to take responsibility for, for the, the extra that they were building. Because if you build all these tools and you, you, and you think about a digital twin, digital twin creates something extra. That, that, that you hadn't really, you haven't really intended to actually build, but it creates something extra. And and so I think the engineers should be or could be more aware of the consequences of their own work, of what they're doing, and take more control. Because I think if there's people who understand this situation, It would be fantastic.
And I don't mean that they should all be in government or that, but they should have more influence, more, a lot more influence on, on what is all being built. Let me comment on that because being engineer myself. Sometimes it is very easy to focus on creating that masterpiece, like the technical capability, right? Because this is what you are trying to do. This is your passion.
So you put your whole focus to create that, that masterpiece, that functionality, that capability. But you need to be able to take the wider perspective, as you said, right? And think about, okay, this is a tool that I created, but that tool can be used in a number of different ways. And sometimes it can be used in a way that I never intended it to be used. So as you pointed out Maybe from the legal perspective and from the strategic perspective on the European level, those engineers should cooperate more closely with policymakers just, you know, to bring those two perspectives together, because I believe that Those both parties can learn from each other a lot and I believe this is what you are trying to, to achieve. By writing your, your book you basically try to fill that very dangerous gap between engineers and, and and policymakers.
way, yes, absolutely. You see, yes, you're right. So around 2000, 2003 I was really shocked because I saw this vision coming there were also people who were trying to to stop it. Like for example Catherine Albrecht in the States who set up a group called Caspian and she focused on RFID and she held anti RFID protests. At one point she went to Germany and she stood in front of the metro supermarket.
And it was very well done because there were only seven people in the protest. But she made a picture, very good picture, and it just looked like there was a lot of people. And the metro halted the RFID trials for two years. Because of this protest, because they were afraid of, they didn't know how big it was, what it's going to be.
People may be thinking there's, you're going to be tracked and traced and there's spy chips on you. That this was her message. So we were talking and in touch and I was thinking I'm not going to do that because for two reasons.
One is at some point you're going to be standing on a crossroads with a small piece of paper shouting to people be careful of this and be careful of this and, and this is going, happening and this is happening and, and that's not really effective. And the other was, was that I was looking at the at the space and I was also talking to companies and asking them but why, why would you want this data? Why do you need this data? And they said, we don't care. We don't care. What, what data this, which is one more data because the more data, the the better our, our data, data mining the better our predictions. And then I thought, well, against an argument like that, you cannot win if that's the argument, if they're going to put tags and sensors everywhere, because.
This is, this is the, what they, what they want. They don't care about the why, they just want more, more of it. And then I thought it's like a historical moment or something.
You cannot stand in the way of that. So it's, if you oppose it You'll, you'll, you'll, you'll be ineffective. So that's why I thought I'd like to, I wrote this book that was picked up by Gerald Santucci in the European Commission. He really liked some of the ideas. And I thought, well, if he likes some of the ideas, I can also maybe work in the projects and and have a still have a critical view, still ask sometimes, not always, but why, and but, but also, but also learn myself and And now, I mean, after 25 years, I'm very happy that I did that. That I didn't choose the position of, we're going to have to stop this, or we're going to hack it, because it's like air.
How can you hack it? You cannot hack air. Now I think, looking at the state of the planet where we brought it and with, with, with the climate change, that's, I think, basically our biggest concern. Of course, there's so many things going on, but we, we need we need this Internet of Things because we basically need to know where all the energy is and where it's going and where it's flowing. So, we need this, basically, this digital twin of the world, if you could think about that.
Which maybe looks like another spaceship because you turn the world into a spaceship if you, if you have this digital twin. We need a good governance for that digital twin. So we simply cannot have.
Individuals or people with lots, large egos wanting big Ferraris or all of these things, sort of, that makes no sense. But we also don't need a kind of governance or government who, who basically distrusts its own because, I mean, that's and we also cannot leave it to people who will simply go on writing laws and having this overblown risk manage, management so it has to be balanced. In, in 25.
Years, I really learned important how important it is and, and how we need it to to basically know and capture and be able to play back certain things that need to be done. And, and I think that's the reason for having it One thing that you said is extremely important and I want to underline it for the audience as well, that when you implement IOT capabilities in your company, as a company owner, you've got the power and it is up to you how you use it. As you gave the example, you can track everyone, let's say in your facility, in your shop, using your product, right? But that doesn't mean that it's a good thing. And I do believe that you've got the responsibility to gather only data required for you to improve the end user experience, but not to track the end user to the extent that you can upsell some services that the person doesn't really need, or even worse, to sell that data that you gathered to some third parties. Because you want to get bigger income and advertisement we'll pay a lot of money for, for the data.
So I totally agree with your point that having the capability. Doesn't mean that you should use it to full extent because that will validate the trust of the, of the end user. This is very, very important and I'm happy that you remind that to everyone because without that, we can very easily go into the way that China did, that we've got full surveillance because IoT allows for that, right? And we can create a digital twin of myself if we got the enough data and then you can. can predict my future actions even better than I am aware of it myself, right? So that brings us to very tricky territory in the no, I, I, I, I fully agree.
And and this is also, this is also growing. So also companies and businesses are beginning to understand that this notion of data minimization is actually also something that's interesting for them. Because if they, if they don't have that much data. Then the compliance that is on their part for the GDPR.
It's very simple. They, they can show that, that they don't hold that much data. If they get hacked there's very little problems or issues because if you only have like one token , for people.
It, it, it may be very different. So this is something that we are also working on with a group of people. And we, we came together during, during COVID because there was, it was at that time, of course, people were panicking, but they were also suggesting very serious measures of, of QR codes and things and trace, so we came together and we we, we found the notion, disposable identities the idea is that we basically as citizens, we would need to have self sovereign identity first. And this idea of self sovereign identity, I think is very strong. It's basically saying that you have a wallet, a digital wallet. And in this wallet, you store credentials that you get from what is now the state.
So you get your passport as a credential. Your birth certificate is a credential. Your driver's license becomes a credential.
Your school diplomas become credential, and you can also build your own cadet credentials that you need to have verified through. Third parties in order to make them really trustworthy, but the idea is that that in, in, in a decade or so, I think we will all have these digital wallets and we can identify ourselves with parts of the wallet. So sometimes you can identify yourself with a a birth certificate, sometimes with a driver's license, and you just show the driver's license, you don't show anything else. And the beauty from that self sovereign identity is that if you have that, you can create your own identities from your own self sovereign identity. That can be a disposable identity. And the beauty of that I think, is that, if you now have the, the spider web, so you, you have the web of the spider, the spider is in the middle, and then you have the web.
At this moment, all the threads can look at the spider, can look at you, and you cannot look back, you don't even know that they are looking, or what they are doing, and this is because we went from, from the actual real world of the village where you know your friends and you say hi and, and this is the son of the baker and, and, and if somebody is gossiping about you, you know, when you go and confront them and say, what did you say about me behind my back? And, but in this world where with all this, this invisible connectivity, we don't know what's, what's happening. We also don't have to know, but Yeah. But it's crazy that we do not know anything.
So in this self sovereign identity world, the spider actually creates every set of identity to every other service provider. So if I I live in a house, we rent, and I pay my energy cost. All I would have to do is send a token to the energy provider and I can pay, a payability token.
That's all this energy provider needs to know. That's all the energy provider needs to get. They just want my money every month, which is fine because I get energy so they can have my money. But that's all. So, I can go through life sending payability tokens to all these people with which I have monthly relationships of money. They don't need to know who I am, where I am, whatever.
It's just irrelevant. And they also don't basically care. They just want the money.
And of course in the token that if I do not pay I breach the contract. Then the token unlocks a phone number, or an email, or, or something, or a, a house num, num, address. Because it's, that's fair.
When you don't, when you breach the contract, then, then you can be, then somebody can come and ask you why you're not paying. But that's it and this is the world that we, we can build. A world in which we, as citizens.
Are basically, are in control of the credentials with which we can expose ourselves to people when they ask questions. And this doesn't mean that society will change and there will still be police and you can still do not, not do anything illegal or strange you'll still be accountable for that. But as long as you're not accountable for any of these things. There's no need to disclose any of this.
And when there is a request from the police or from, from any type of authority that they would like to see a credential, and then so, that is logical, and then there are certain procedures just like there are now. But I think the key is that we have to I have to make sure that the spider, that we in the middle, we, we control every identity. And it sounds like a lot of work, but it's actually not, because you don't have that much of these providers. You just do it once, and then you, and then, and then everything is, can, can can go like that.
And I also think actually that these providers would actually like such a thing, because they just basically want the money. They don't want the burden of having all this information because it could just get them in trouble. Because if it's hacked, they're in trouble. If there's some, if somebody's disclosing it from inside of the company, they're liable.
This digital twin, like you say, it's become so powerful that we as citizens, we also need our own tools to, to have a little bit more agency. Because otherwise we, will lose all our capabilities to to, to ask yeah, how we are, how we are viewed or, or, or what we should do. You painted a beautiful Future, I would say, where we are in the control of our identities, we are still keep responsible for paying our bills and obeying the law, right? Because it's not about us trying to, to, to hack the law, right? But we are in control. And that reminded me.
For instance, GDPR was what was introduced. I remember that I had tons of projects because every company to your point, got tons of personal data that they don't necessarily need it, to be honest, to provide the service. And all of the sudden they were responsible. For tracking the data for providing a means for me to ask them to first reveal what they know about me and then to remove that. And it was not that easy for them because they just dumped everything into a huge database without really thinking how to.
Use the data in the future. that goes back to your point that the IOT generates tons of data and some companies just want to Store it and they will figure out later on how they want to use it But that puts them at risk as you said that if someone compromise your system Then all of a sudden they've got access to lots of data that you shouldn't have in first place, right? , as a business owner, you should really think if tracking your users. really gives you the value versus how much it puts you into the risk if someone's going to compromise your system or even just run a typical audit of your system, right? And they discover that you've got some personal data that is totally not relevant to the service you offer. So I think that is being able to create that identity as you said for that specific service provider and create this contract between you and that provider. This is powerful topic. I would really love to, to see it coming.
And from implementation standpoint cause it's very, it's Reminded me blockchain and smart contracts is the way that you think we will implement it in the future or maybe there's going to be Some new technology or because yeah, what's what's your point on that? First of all, I want to say that that I also fully agree with the GDPR because basically what I just described is the, is the ultimate case of GDPR, which is like purpose based, time based sort of, it has all these it's, it's really GDPR. And then you also said. Which is very true. We are accountable in this system because, because if we want to build this for, for a world in which we live and you cannot build a world on anonymity or anonymous. I mean, that's, that's, that's not a world that, that you can build.
We need to be accountable, but we, we have to have the tools of this accountability in our own hands. That sounds like like you're asking a lot or like you're asking very much, but it's the logical emancipation of the citizen in the digital world. If we want to talk about human rights and we should. And then they should be upheld in the real world, in the digital and analog world, but also in the world that is this digital twin world. And we cannot go in there with with being like this spider in the web. If this is going to be achieved with blockchain, it's very well possible, but it may be also possible that other other technologies are now are now coming.
let's back to, to your book and to, to the frameworks for policy making. Could you describe a few ideas that you suggest how can we improve the policy making in that digital twin world that we are living Yeah, I think so first lemme tell you like a little story. It's like there's a group of kids in the, in the in, in, in school, in class, and there's a teacher. And a teacher is slowly dressing herself up. As Santa Claus. So, she, she puts on the boots.
She, she puts, puts on the cape. She, she puts on the hat. And the kids are still happy and smiling and laughing and clapping.
And then she puts on the beard. And the kids start shouting, Santa Claus, Santa Claus. So, and they don't they don't question where the teacher went. So the, the, the teacher just disappeared in front of her, of their eyes. Like, but, but, but Santa Claus is here, right? So, so that's a bit the point where we are now with this politics and with, with, with policymaking the people in policy, like the 200 year, People in European policy, like the economists and the lawyers and the people who did fantastic work bringing the harmony. They're not engineers.
They're not they're not scientists. They, they do not they cannot understand that things can change quickly. They always move as if tomorrow the day is the same and then they're just gonna be, oh, there's just gonna be this and this and, and this, this meeting will be there and then this meeting will be there. It's just, well very difficult to get this type of, of intelligence to, to see these big changes. Of course, the last months and with the American situation, it has really, it is somehow changed.
People are now talking about digital sovereignty. people are talking about strategic autonomy for Europe. I'm also reading a lot of meals and notes coming from Holland and people are talking about having their own cloud.
And of course, I mean, for us, that's a bit late in terms of realizing that that 70 percent of your information or data is in, in some kind of. Either Azure or, or Amazon or some cloud. I mean, this, this was something that you and me, we, we put that on the table a long time ago and said, do you really want to go that way? And but nobody could understand it. Then nobody listened. Now there is some good awareness. And that's, that's, that's actually quite interesting also for what I wrote, because that's basically what I was writing.
And I think there's two , main solutions. One is basically we have the networks that, that we, that we know. We have the, the body area network where we have the bomb. We have the local area network where we have the, the, the, the, the home. We have the wide area network where we have the car mainly. And we have the very wide area network where we have the smart city.
And these are well described and there's a lot of work going on in all of them. And I think basically what we need is like a PAN or some other type of network that, that we put, that we put over these these networks in which we build new forms of governance and new governance systems. So a lot of work's already being done. And I think that the catalyst for this is, is the phone. And that was the brilliance of Steve Jobs who came back to Apple and then built the iPhone. And he said in this space of flows, you only have basically one or two chances to, to to grab the value.
And it was true, the value was in the device. And he controlled what went in and what went out. the app store. And in the beginning, he even controlled the telcos of who, which the iPhone would talk to.
So now we're in Europe. We have 17 or 18 directives. We are regulating data, data space, chip, AI, edge, cloud, you name it. It's all being regulated. And I think all of these 17 or 18 regulations could be implemented, not asked for to all the big tech to be compliant to. If you regulate the one thing that they don't think about, which is the phone.
So if we have a European phone. We distribute that to 450 500 million people. Then we can have an operating system and native ai, our own AI with AI Act implemented. Running from the chip. We have the chip manufacturers. We have the a smell manufacturers.
So we can do that. We can build our entire open source service structure because we don't need Google or because search and friends and shopping. It's although I really admire what they did. It's not really rocket science.
It's also something that we can do too. We can also set up a search search engine. I think we have several in Europe that are very good and we just implement them on that, on that, on that device. And then we have a wallet and at the moment the wallet. Has to lower cryptographic tools in order to comply with Apple and, and, and Google and Android.
So, so imagine we are 500, 400, 500 million Europeans. We get a wallet and we cannot have our own crypto. Ideas and there's like, there's, there's several powerful scientific papers being written against this.
So, if you have a wallet, And if you're a 450 million zone, that wallet should be hardware. It should, it should be in your own hardware, and you should fully control the supply chain of that hardware. So where would you put that hardware? You don't want to give somebody a wallet.
You give somebody a phone with a wallet in it. If you have 500 million or 450 million devices, the edge becomes the cloud. So basically a primary cloud becomes the phone. And it, it allows us also to think about the debate that's now going on in terms of media wisdom, in terms of strong depression in youth, which also is partially caused by connectivity.
And this is all being documented. So we can, we can, we can give a 13 year old a different image than a 16 year old or sort of, we can try to, the basic things that I'm trying to think, it's all very simple, is you have all these laws now we need to, to discuss with 10, 000 partners, and if they, if they would be so kind to comply and all that we have, basically, if they say we're not complying, is, is fines. Well, there's so much money around, sort of like at, at, at the other end, that they're not gonna be very upset with having to pay some money. And with the current American administration, they're also gonna fully back the fact that they don't, don't have to do that, or that they want to do that, because they've already Spoken about that.
I think it just needs this click of mindset that instead of. Trying to get compliance for all these laws, why don't you implement them on your own hardware? It's, it's not rocket science. We had a commissioner, Breton and he was tweeting very happily that that he or the unit had been able, to get one feature from TikTok removed. So. I'm a citizen.
I happily pay my taxes, of course. And and, and my leadership in, in Europe is sort of is smiling and happy that, that he got one feature from TikTok removed. So that, yeah, that's, that's beyond, I mean, that's just very sad This is a man who came from a technological background, who, who, who was supposed to understand the situation. And if this man then, sort of does a thing like that, you think, well, that's so I hope indeed that there's going to be a better conversation and discussion between the engineers and the policymakers and the makers and the policymakers and, and they should be far more in control of what's going on. To your point that the hardware is already available, we can create chips both for AI and chips just to manufacture the phone itself. Software is also already in place.
Of course, it can always be better, but we've got very strong foundation to, to build what you just described. And in a way that phone Would be the ultimate IOT device and kind of your own digital twin in a way, right? Because you've got that wallet and that wallet got all of your identities and you can use those identities on purpose and you can transfer money, whatever type of money we will have in the future, right? Maybe that's going to be one currency, maybe a multiple. It doesn't really matter. So I think this is very, very competing feature.
But that is kind of, you know, almost as hard as to create a backbone for the internet. Because you need to have all of those parties agreed on a common standard. And I think nowadays.
That let's say policy and legal is way harder than the tech itself. So we need to, to create that common understanding. And I believe that what you're trying That's, that's, that's it.
And and then indeed, so it's all about timing. So. So, sometimes, for strange reasons, things sort of do happen, and so, I believe that. And I also really like what you said about it can be or it's an IoT device. Exactly. Because We can talk to people about the phone, but we can make this into the most interesting IOT device with running messaging service , and IOT gateway sort of that's absolutely absolutely possible.
The last thing is, I was in a group now, it's called 6G for Society, so I never thought about it. But now, I read about this 6G and things, and this 6G is supposed to be around for 2030. And it would also seem like a very good use case to me such that it'd be like a 6G phone. This is the easy part, which is technology, We can build a technology, but then it is just a tool that can be used by someone with good intent or with someone with not that good intent in their mind.
So I think we need to educate people and educate policy makers as you are doing that there are capabilities already at hand, but the decisions. That are made today, they've got profound impact on our society in the future, either you own your data or you trust some third party will take a better care of your data than, than yourself or your government, which might or might not be true, but I would love to have, that possibility to choose, right? I want to be responsible for my data. So let's say I will have that IOT device, let's, let's call that the phone and I'm responsible for managing my identity. And if someone's going to steal that for me, well, that's kind of my fault, right? Cause maybe I was too open in granting access to that wallet. But what I see is that people not always want to take responsibility for their own actions or their own.
No. Data even, right? They, they just accept the, whatever terms they, they get in order to have some new shiny up on their phone without really thinking if that app is stealing from them or right. And I think what we will see, and this is also maybe something that we can do or others that are to find it is we will get new intermediaries who will. Who will indeed build this build this identity for people on their phones.
So you basically talk to people, what, what, what's kind of the levels that they want to share, with whom and what, and then you set, and then you do it for them. You set it for them. It can become a new service.
And because indeed, a lot of people are not going to do this themselves. I'm not expecting people to, to. do it themselves. Going back to that, that crypto, right? So currently crypto is extremely difficult for non it people in general. And I think that is a huge problem. If we are going to create that digital identity the same way that is very hard to, to use by non IT people that will not grant you the global adoption that that's true, I think you, but what's also happening is that we, we get a younger and younger population.
And I'm not saying that they're all savvy with this, but there's a growing group of younger users who are more familiar with this. So maybe actually this is a good idea for your second book because you've got a book for policymakers. Maybe you should write for the end users, right? Just to create the awareness. Yeah, I, I think it's all goes down to the education, right? Because we keep creating better and better tools, but it is our responsibility, let's say as engineers to educate people about proper use and misuse of, of what we, we provided Yes, I, I fully agree, fully agree with you and it's a good um, suggestion.
I'll think about it and to yes, I'll think about it, but it yeah, thanks. Thank you. Yeah. do believe that you're the right person, especially because of your, your own story, right? That you look at it from a number of different perspectives. And you see all of those connections that are sometimes hidden.
You've got all of those years of experience that Basically, you can kind of anticipate how the whole digital twin will evolve in the future. Right? Because you've seen it starting from very primitive shape, like the data structure, where we are, what are the potential for the future when we add that new mobile phone, that new wallet, and going beyond. So, yeah, I think we, we need to open the discussion. that's a great honor coming from you that you say you say that.
So thanks a lot. I'll try to do my best and I'll think about writing. Yeah, I think about writing that. Yeah. Perfect. So before ending up this conversation, if you could just share how people can contact you and how people can order your book, because I do believe it is worth reading by both IT and non IT people generally interested in their own identity, That's my email.
So if people want to reach me, just send me an email and I will send a link to the, to the, to the book. Um, That's uh, that'd be uh, yeah, that'd be great. In that case, Rob, thank you so much for taking the time to, to, to meet with me today, to, to sharing your wisdom and to, to helping make all of us to build a better future Well, I'm, I'm very happy to hear that you, I'm very happy to hear that, so thanks a lot for having me.
Thank you for listening. Go to the thingrex. com to find more materials about the Internet of Things domain. I'm your host, Lukasz Malinowski, the Internet of Things Advisor and Trainer.
2025-03-05 21:14
