The sticker on the box says that all this IoT “stuff” gives you more time, more agency, more data and more process control, but does it, really? Does a black box simplify or complicate?
When engineering, economics and philosophy share the same bed, someone is getting a bad night’s sleep. If our key slogan is “improving human capacity,” how do we build for that and still make enough profit to run a business? How do you measure capacity building?
Time-to-Competence (TTC)
The surface argument is that we are “saving time” by adding an IoT element to our workflow. How long does it take a “normal person (legal: Reasonable person)” to become useful with a system. An old tractor might take days, but competency on different terrain with different loads might take years. In the case of a relatively straightforward IoT stack it might be weeks. For a cloud locked “black box,” maybe never, based on proprietary intellectual capital and service contracts.
Failure Independence Ratio
This is not a standard term of reference, but the idea is easy to grasp. When something breaks can the user fix it without permission? Let’s say the spectrum on this one starts with immediate calls to the vendor, based on warranty or refund claims. Level 2 might be an easily replaced module. Level 3 might be a local repair and diagnose option (with or without the help of remote support). Level 4, might be the option to run without this element until it gets replaced, simply pulling a feature offline temporarily. The more compounding autonomy the user has the higher up the scale we move. The lower it gets, the closer we move to learned helplessness and throwaway culture..
Skill Half-Life
How long do skills remain valid? Mechanical skills can last for decades and are transferable across domains. Electrical fundamentals deliver a lifetime of value. Proprietary dashboards, 18 months, maybe.
My brother once ventured an opinion on a new project management job title; “Sounds fancy, but they will have a new buzzword in a year.” His realpolitik pinpointed the exact timeframe. A short half-life is a treadmill economy, a long half-life is civilizational memory. You can track this empirically in trades, farms, factories. Simplicity is not easy, nor is it cheap.
Toolchain Ownership Index
Who owns the firmware, the schematics, the diagnostic interface, the update schedule. This one is tricky, especially in a field as security conscious as wireless communications. You don’t want the “bad guys’ hacking your data streams and you really don’t want it to be anonymous. Tricky.
Crisis Performance
This one is equally brutal: When supply chains fail, servers go dark, or politics intervene, does the system still work? As so much of our technology stack is distributed between much larger corporations and entities, overall complexity increases. A simple axiom is; the more links in a chain, the more weak points there are. The upside here is that we can build in failsafe options; edge computing, local network and data backups. Each time you claw back some autonomy, the price goes up.
What we have are design constraints. Those are usually driven by money. The difference between need to have and nice to have, is how those choices are configured, and how many there are. There is also a political undercurrent relating to control that flits around in various disguises; profitability, security, life cycle, repairability, upgrades and disposability.
What we come down to are the same considerations we addressed in the last post. Capital wants to move currency, so it favors quarterly reports, annual dividends and management bonuses. Human agency builds crisis tolerance, lifelong skillsets, and toolchain ownership. That old quote about the “wolf that you feed” applies here.
