What is the Internet of Things?
Among the various lockdown viewing options offered by Netflix is
a series of animated short stories called "Love, Death and
Robots", which span a breath of genres, from comedy, horror to
Sci-Fi and fantasy. The second series features one called
"Automated Customer Service" – a darkly comedic
episode, which imagines a dystopian future where virtually all
human roles, from housekeeping and gardening to lifeguards, have
been replaced by artificial intelligence. This episode demonstrates
the danger of such dependency on robots (and inept automated
customer services), when a hapless householder triggers
"intruder" mode in her housekeeping robot, leading to a
murderous chase. Away from the cautionary tales of AI, this
animated short neatly encapsulates the Internet of Things (IoT)
– a series of interconnected objects embedded with sensors
and software, each communicating with others over the Internet,
relaying and reacting to continually
