These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017.

We’ve seen the benefits of realtime data for gathering information about the world, but the interactive part of daemons will prove even more powerful. Daemons will likely begin as REST APIs, and all manner of intuitive endpoints will be available depending on the object.

Restaurants will have /information, and /business, and /menu, and /climate, and /entertainment, among dozens of others. The parent organization for the restaurant will query the /statistics endpoint constantly to know exactly how many patrons are present, what they’re eating, what they’re talking about, which waiters they prefer, which meals they finish and which they don’t, etc.

This is not updated every hour or every day—it’s updated many times per second as interactions from other daemons within the restaurant stream in.

So when a customer wants to order, they (actually their assistant) will do so by transparently interacting with the restaurant’s /menu endpoint. When it’s time to pay, it’ll be done automatically via the /payment endpoint. If they want information on what’s showing on the displays, or who the waiters are, or what type of live music will be here this week, they can get all of that easily from the daemon as well.

The same will apply to vehicles and people and cities, with endpoints such as /routes, and /preferences, and /population as respective examples.

This is all powerful, but there’s a problem. What are we as individual humans supposed to do with these thousands of daemons that constantly surround us? How can we possibly parse all that information and make use of it, let alone manage all the requests we’ll be submitting on our own behalf?

We can’t really. That’s what Synthetic Intelligence is for.

Summary

1. Daemons not only enable data gathering about objects, but also the making of requests and other types of interactions.
2. The various intuitive functions of an object will be presented in this way, depending on the type of object.
3. In order to make use of daemonization, we’ll need to be SI-augmented.