In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One
WELCOME TO — THE PROGRAMMABLE — In our houses, cars, and factories, we're surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do. Now they are beginning to talk to one another.
Context & Ripple Effects
This Wired essay lands at the point where two earlier threads converge. In late 2011, Twine showed hobbyists wiring everyday objects to the internet one gadget at a time, and that same autumn smart cities were described as needing their own operating system to coordinate urban sensors. What changes by May 2013 is the unit of analysis: no longer the single connected object, but the claim that household, automotive, and factory devices are beginning to talk to each other directly.
That shift matters because it moves the story from connectivity — getting things online — to orchestration, which raises the question of whose software sits above the devices. The essay frames embedded sensors capturing data on how people live as the substrate, with machine-to-machine communication as the new layer being added on top.
First-order effects
- Device makers shipping connected products as isolated apps-and-gadget pairs face immediate pressure to make their objects interoperate, since the essay's premise devalues any device that only talks to its own vendor's cloud.
- Owners of sensor-equipped homes, cars, and factories gain the first practical benefits of cross-device data sharing — automation triggered by combinations of signals rather than single-device readouts.
Second-order effects
- A platform contest opens over which operating layer coordinates the devices, extending the logic already argued for cities in 2011 down to houses and factories — whoever owns the orchestration layer sets terms for every device maker beneath it.
- Suppliers of the tiny intelligent components the essay describes see demand decouple from any single product category, since the same sensing modules serve appliances, vehicles, and industrial equipment alike.
Third-order effects
- If objects genuinely act as one, competitive advantage migrates from hardware differentiation to interoperability standards and the data exhaust they generate, making the behavioral record itself a durable asset for whoever aggregates it.
- The pattern points toward regulation and standards bodies becoming decisive players, because a world of cooperating devices cannot function if each vendor's protocol stays proprietary — coordination problems of the kind city OS proposals anticipated become economy-wide.
The trend: Computing is migrating off screens and into an ambient layer of networked objects, with the battleground shifting from connecting devices individually to orchestrating them collectively.