The World in 2030

68 The World in 2030
instantaneous and perfectly accurate. They administer
tolls based on precise routes. One American firm
leases cars to people with bad credit who cannot get
a loan, knowing that if payments are missed it can
block the ignition and find the car to repossess it.
British insurers offer policies with premiums based
on precisely when and where a person drives. 129
Dr David Clark, 130 a computer scientist at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology who helped develop the internet,
believes that in fifteen or twenty years’ time the network
will need to accommodate a trillion devices, most of
them wireless.
Even though we are only at the beginning of the
development of what some people have called ‘the
internet of things’, novel and supremely useful applications
are emerging. Companies like the giant
retailer Wal-Mart 131 are already tracking their inventories
with RFID tags and soon shoppers will no
longer need to unload their shopping carts at checkout
tills. The RFID tags on every item will simply
transmit their identities to a scanner and a bill will
be presented to customers (who will pay it by waving
their mobile devices over the scanner) – and all of
these enabling devices will be made largely of plastic,
a material that is rapidly becoming ‘smart’.
Wireless sensors will make a huge contribution to energy
conservation. If every light fixture in a building
contained a small wireless node, people would not
only be able to control the lighting more effectively