Every day, I keep reading about the crazy numbers of devices being attached to the Internet. This includes everything from your typical desktop computer to your refrigerator. This trend reminds me of a very common saying the South. Just because you can do something, does not mean that you should do it. I think this little nugget of knowledge could not be more true than in the world of the Internet of Things (IoT). Don't get me wrong, here. I'm not railing against technology, in general. In fact, well planned and purposeful technologies happen to improve our collective lives each and every day. If you spend any amount of time listening to the technology pundits, they will tell you that we have never been so fortunate as to have real-time and up to the femtosecond (i.e. 10E-15 seconds) access to data. We can learn things about ourselves and all aspects of our lives because of these new revelations. Although it seems impossible to even suggest attempting to stop the trend of connecting everything to the Internet, it begs the question: Who thought this was a good idea? In the IoT world, devices that autonomously talk to the Internet by publishing facts, vastly outnumber people on the Internet. The so-called smart devices are akin to new Twitter users, they are monitoring for some specific activity so they can rush to tweet it out so that some poor subscriber to that feed can learn the up to the femtosecond amount of cheesecake yogurt in machine unit 3 at The Brain Freeze yogurt shop in Turlock, California. This kind of activity seems innocent enough, right? Well, not so fast, Buster! The estimates of smart IoT devices inches closer to the projected target of 200 billion connected devices by the year 2020. BTW, that is less than four years away. That number does not consider the estimated 8 billion people that are projected to be online at that same instance in [future] time. Can you imagine 208 billion conversations happening, …at the same #*&%^*$! time? At this point, would someone indulge my simple request to make most of the IoT devices of the “dumb” variety? Like humans, everyone is not considered smart. We all have talents, of course, but society often labels the divergent types as “thought leaders”, etc. The rest of us listen to their brilliance and buy their products and the world spins happily along. If everyone was so-called “smart”, who would be there to listen and consume all of the words and tangible stuff they produce. Okay, so maybe it's not so smart to put people into this conversation about smart versus dumb, but we should consider just this point for Internet connected devices of the IoT variety. Smart devices talk whenever they want and can communicate to a single recipient or broadcast messages to whomever subscribes to that device's information channel. Let's do a quick calculation to make what I believe will be a simple (but Earth shattering Ka-Boom type of) point. Let's start by excluding all of the humans from the example. That puts us at 200 billion devices. Let's also give each device a message budget of 30 bytes at a frequency of 1 message per second. To be clear: 200E+9 devices x 1Msg/1 Sec x 30 Bytes/ 1 Msg x 86400 Sec/1 Day = 5.18E+17 Bytes/Day Given the Energy Per MB of data of 2.58 Watt-Hours/MB The Energy consumed in the average day to support 200 billion chatty IoT devices is 1.3 TeraWatt-Hours. Now, let's turn all of our devices into dumb IoT devices that get queried once per day to provide a single 30 byte message. Using the same methodology, the energy required per day is 15.5 MegaWatt-Hours. smart IoT devices (in full chat mode) required 100,000 times as much energy as the example using dumb IoT devices. Wow! That is Earth shattering, because “Dumb” appears to be smart and Smart appears to be dumb, when it comes to energy requirements to support all of the information to be pushed across the Internet so you can get the latest insights from any device on the planet in near-real-time fashion. Can you image the picture of forests being fed tree by tree into a shredder to produce the fuel to feed our insatiable craving for up to the femtosecond insights? Remember, just because we can, does not mean that we should! 
