How Might the Internet of Things Change Society

How Might the Internet of Things Change Society
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Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a buzzword in recent decades due to the proliferation of new technologies and devices. Today, billions of people use devices that are connected to others that form a wider network of devices that communicate and share information across the users. Such a system is called the IoT since the primary element connecting the devices is the internet. IoT has revolutionized human life and activities. For example, one can access health records on their mobile phones or share the same with the physicians and hospitals. Similarly, many people use social media or do online shopping, all of which are major examples of how the IoT shapes the world. Overall, it has been established that IoT has simplified human life through such applications as automation and ease of access to information.
How Might the Internet of Things Change Society
The developments in technology have always been associated with both positive and negative implications on society. The term Internet of Things (IoT) was coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton to imply the proliferation of smart devices interconnected to build a global communication infrastructure. According to Patel et al., (2016), the term IoT refers to the network comprising anything with the internet based on set protocols through information sensors used to exchange information and communication to achieve such goals as positioning, smart recognition, tracing, administration, and monitoring. In recent years, the concept of IoT is often used to imply communication infrastructure, sensors, actuators, and other smart devices that facilitate digitization. Additionally, IoT has revolutionized virtually all industries, including healthcare, agriculture, homes, travel and transport, and safety and security. As such, it can be observed that almost all aspects of human life are influenced by the emergence of IoT. Therefore, there is a need to explore the topic of how IoT changes society.
The focus of this essay will be on addressing the question of how IoT might change society. To achieve this objective, multiple aspects of people’s daily lives will be explored to establish what role IoT plays. Examples include employment, health and fitness, shopping, security, and monitoring and controlling in business applications. As will be illustrated, the IoT offers convenience to people’s lives by making it easier and tasks simpler on one hand. On the other hand, society has to contend with such challenges as privacy, which could endanger their wellbeing. Therefore, both positive and negative implications of the IoT on society are explored.
Employment
Employment can be regarded as one of the most basic and common economic activities since it means deploying labor, one of the factors of production. The IoT has had several impacts on employment, most of which deal with the management of human capital. Some of the effects touch on such areas as workplace safety and digitization of the workplace. Many scholars today agree that IoT adoption has been a key driver of workplace digitization. According to Mahler and Westergren (2018), information technology has been used in workplaces since the 1950s and has been associated with increased productivity of workers and a decline in the costs of information exchange. With the idea of IoT, it can be argued that workplace digitization changes the nature of employment, especially the roles and responsibilities of the employees. For example, automation and the use of robotics in such factories as Tesla and other car manufacturers means that large numbers of people have been replaced by machines. Additionally, those people left in these industries have seen their employment change significantly due to the changes in skillsets required. IoT has changed employment through automation of certain roles and changing the job roles of other positions within the workplace.
The impacts of IoT o employment in terms of digitization can be understood by using the concept of Industry 4.0 in manufacturing. The rationale is that following the definition of IoT provided earlier, it emerges that the main idea of IoT is the interconnection of smart devices. Under the umbrella of Industry 4.0, several smart technologies are encompassed, including IoT, 3D printing, augmented reality, and big data analytics (Freddi, 2018). Manufacturing companies deploying all these novel technologies have changed their outlooks such that the manual skills previously used to perform human tasks have faded. Industry 4.0 means that almost all aspects of employment have become digitized, including decision-support systems where machines can make decisions. Such functions used to be performed by human beings, which means that the nature of employment has changed entirely.
In the example given earlier of Tesla’s manufactory, roots perform most of the tasks leaving few employment positions. Recently, Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, announced the development of a humanoid robot that would be used to handle everyday boring tasks. The Tesla bot is already being deployed across multiple engineering positions, including electrical, controls, mechanical, autonomy, software, and embedded firmware (Lambert, 2021). These positions were among the few where people were employed, which means that employment in the face of IoT will continue to suffer. The main question that arises is what happens when all job positions are occupied by smart gadgets developed through IoT. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the major concept in IoT that makes it possible for the infrastructure to perform and behave as it does. Without AI, the devices would not be considered smart and the IoT would simply be a platform for information exchange. However, AI makes the devices smart such that they can perform roles previously performed by humans, including decision-making. Besides the manual jobs, managerial employees are not becoming the next target of IoT and will soon be replaced by smart robots.
As mentioned earlier, some of the implications of IoT on employment focus on the management of human capital. In human resource management (HRM), some of the major functions include recruitment and selection, training and development, and remuneration. In conjunction with other departments, the safety of the workplace may also be the responsibility of the HRM managers. In this regard, the IoT has changed how firms perform tasks related to HRM. According to Kravčík et al. (2017), Industry 4.0 is leveraged across multiple industries for workplace learning and training. In other words, employers are resorting to the deployment of smart technologies to enhance the training and development of their workers. Besides replacing workers, the businesses are also making efforts to continuously improve the competencies and skills of their workers. IoT offers the necessary tools for this purpose, which means that employment further experiences positive outcomes from smart technologies.
Workplace engagement is another aspect of HRM in the workplace where people's employment success depends on how well a company engages the workers. Engagement is made possible through communicating and interacting, which is the primary purpose of the IoT infrastructure. As explained by Nor et al. (2018), the IoT helps organizations retain their top talent through engagement practices that help create corporate citizenship. Generation Y is considered to be drastically volatile and does not owe allegiance to any employer. Their engagement is deemed critical since it is one of the few tools used by employers to keep millennials interested in their jobs. In terms of workplace safety, IoT tools and devices have proven critical in such applications as monitoring health and such incidences as the body falls. Examples offered by Kianoush et al., (2017) include body-worn devices, including cameras and video or acoustic devices. These devices detect and report human behaviors through wireless connections, which help prevent accidents and help keep health conditions in check.
Security
One of the biggest concerns for IoT deployment across various facets of human life is security. Interconnecting devices means exposure and heightened vulnerability to attacks. In other words, each of the devices in an IoT network infrastructure can be a source of cyber threats. Today, studies on the role, evolution, and implications of IoT are accompanied by an examination of the security implication. However, one can observe that all developments in IoT are followed by security improvement measures. For example, the concept of software-defined networking (SDN) emerged as a result of the advances in computer networking and it offers security solutions for a network by controlling its overall behavior (Al Hayajneh et al., 2020). Such security measures acknowledge that the devices can be a source of threat, which means that security efforts aimed at monitoring each device in a network are a logical approach. However, understanding the nature of the security concerns in an IoT infrastructure means going beyond the devices themselves and exploring the nature and targets of an attack.
Attacks on an IoT infrastructure have been well-documented in the literature. Al Hayajneh et al. (2020) establish that the attacks can be categorized into two: attacks on data phases and attacks on architect layers. The main role of the architect layers of a network is to transmit packets from source to destination, often by finding the best routes. Attacks on architect layers focus on disrupting the path between the source and destination. The types of attacks include IP spoofing, hijacking, and smurf attacks. Attacks on data phases focus majorly on data ranson, a total wipe-out of data, or other attacks targeting the data itself. Today, many data leakages have occurred in corporations with massive financial and other implications. The attackers are often after personal and sensitive data that can be used against individuals and corporations. For example, the Capital One data breach that occurred in 2019 exposed 106 million people to data theft, including personal details, addresses, and social security numbers (BBC, 2019). This is considered to be the largest attack in banking history. This example serves to indicate the extent to which IoT infrastructure can be vulnerable to attacks. Additionally, this example shows how attacks on data phases take place where hackers gain unauthorized access to a company's IoT system and take control of the data.
Other major attacks on IoT that have been witnessed over the last decade indicate that it is increasingly impossible to build and completely secure IoT infrastructure. Besides the two classifications of attacks given above, other classifications also exist depending on the nature of the attack. Research by Malhotra, et al. (2021) highlights ten attacks and three anomalies most common in an IoT. Examples of the attacks include active attacks, which target the confidentiality and integrity of the system. Such attacks include denial of service, alteration, man-in-the-middle, interruption, and distributed denial of service. Passive attacks are intended for gathering information without getting discovered, for example, traffic analysis, monitoring, and eavesdropping. Physical layer attacks tamper and exploit devices, which makes them the most vulnerable terminal in an IoT infrastructure. Examples include jamming, replication, and node tampering. All other classifications of attacks offer unique threats depending on what the attackers hope to achieve. For instance, software-based attacks seek to gain access to and destroy a system through such attacks as worms, Trojan horse, and viruses. Overall, it is apparent that attacks in an IoT system can emanate from multiple sources, which makes it increasingly difficult to defend on all fronts.
With the nature of attacks having been described, the next question that needs addressing is how the security of IoT can be enhanced. At this stage, it has been made apparent that IoT exposes individuals and corporations to massive threats. However, it can also be expressed that the massive benefits derived from these systems mean that they are indispensable for most people. The best pathway to resolving this dilemma is addressing the security concerns to make IoT as secure as possible, which is a challenge in itself. Current studies have proposed possible solutions that take into consideration the complexity of the IoT environment. According to Ahanger and Aljumah (2019), some scholars have suggested a cube structure model that converges privacy, security, and trust in an IoT environment. The integrated model addresses key security challenges, including identity management, authentication, and embedded security. The key security concern for an IoT infrastructure is resilience to attacks, which implies that IoT systems should be able to recover. However, such measures as access control, data security, and secure network access as only useful if attackers are completely blocked. However, even the most secure networks have been hacked in the past and hackers will continue to develop new tactics and methods to attack.
Overall, IoT has made millions of people vulnerable to cyber-attacks, even those without direct access to the IoT systems. In the Capital One example provided earlier, the 106 million people exposed in the data breach were not part of the bank’s IoT infrastructure. However, the fact that their data was stored in the company’s systems means that even the customers themselves become targets for these threats. Similarly, all individuals with access to interconnected devices face the same challenge from attacks that target personal and sensitive data. For instance, phones and personal computers can be hacked to access passwords to online banking or credit card data, which could lead theft of victims’ money. Regardless of how useful and indispensable the IoT has become for modern society, the inability to ensure complete security of the IoT environment means individuals will always be vulnerable to attacks.
Health and Fitness
The applications of IoT continue to expand to cover even those areas that are critically sensitive. Health and fitness is an area where new technologies have produced massive positive results and hardly any detriment to the wellbeing of the users. In essence, the use of IoT in healthcare faces the same security challenges as other environments as explained in the section above. However, it can be observed from empirical evidence that IoT has positively revolutionized health and fitness where health challenges are now easier to resolve. In many cases, IoT tools are often used as sources of information, communication tools, and even research and development. A case study of orthopedics presented by Haleem et al. (2020) illustrates how IoT has impacted healthcare. In this case, IoT has been responsible for the advances in treatment, information, surgery, education, and research and development. In orthopedic surgery, IoT facilitates effective communication between patients and physicians, which improves the chances of recovery for the patients. Additionally, the IoT infrastructure is used in the collection of patient data and such functions as creating routine patient alerts following up the recovery after surgery. These benefits were hardly obtained without the application of IoT in this medical field of practice, which also applies to other fields.
Besides orthopedics, IoT has also helped make massive improvements in other fields of healthcare. Some scholars acknowledge that even though the benefits of IoT spread across all fields of life, the benefits in healthcare are more significant due to the cutting-edge transition facilitated by IoT (Nazir et al., 2019). In this case, these authors acknowledge that IoT in healthcare is further facilitated by the application of mobile computing, which means accessing healthcare services through digital devices. Besides patient-doctor communication, mobile health facilitates the connectivity of all health resources and services. Apps and software have been developed to make it possible for patients to reach out to hospitals and individual caregivers as the need arises. Basic health monitoring capabilities are also enhanced, which means that physicians and patients are constantly aware of the health conditions, recovery progress, or even responses to treatment. Patients no longer need to be hospitalized for their health conditions to be monitored. This function is perfectly possible using mobile health applications. Applications of IoT in healthcare can be summarized in the figure below:
Applications of IoT inhealthcareSingle conditionapplicationCluster cond...