According to Bill Ruh, the underpinnings of our industrial society will be profoundly changed by 2020. Every form of large-scale machinery will be suffused with sensors and software controls, all more and more interoperable. Increasing productivity, raising profits, eliminating waste, ensuring environmental quality, and improving manufacturing processes will all be automated activities, functions of a kind of ghost in the machine. There will be at least 1 billion more digital electric power meters than there were in 2015; more than 100 million lightbulbs will be connected to the Internet, turned on and off by sensor or smartphone; and machines produced by just one company, GE, will generate a million terabytes of data per day, much of it in the form of operational statistics that adjust machines to make them more efficient every day they are in use.
Image: Photograph by Matthew Septimus
