The true long-lasting impact of the Internet will be in how we harness the power of the web to transform how we make decisions in the physical world.
Instead of just focusing on how to improve our online lives, the far greater potential is in combining online and offline interactions. The power of the web is how we can structure, measure, analyze and evaluate the massive amount of data we continually create to guide our decisions in real-time.
In the physical world, however, we invariably face a lengthy lag between when data is created and when it is used in a decision. We constantly make decisions using incomplete information because we have no choice; collecting more data is often too expensive, too difficult or simply not possible. Thus we create heuristics, stereotypes, rules of thumb and other methods for making decisions in environments we do not fully understand.
While collecting more data does not always lead to better decisions, technology is creating unparalleled opportunities for us to use larger amounts of up-to-date data to make quicker decisions. We are beginning to see web technologies address larger opportunities in navigating the physical world using dynamic, real-time, structured data in addition to our more typical use of the web to access static, dated data (e.g. restaurants, bars and driving directions).
For example, SFpark is an experiment in using web technology to help people find open parking spaces throughout the city using sensors embedded in the pavement to detect used and vacant parking spaces. From The Economist:
The SFpark project will begin early in 2009 with a new network of pavement sensors in 6,000 of San Francisco’s metered parking spaces and 11,500 of its off-street car parks and garages. These sensors will detect when a space is taken and relay that information to a central database. From there, information about vacant parking spots will pass to drivers in several ways. The most basic will be through a network of road signs that will indicate areas with parking places. Eventually, however, officials want to provide web and mobile phone services that display the availability of parking block by block on a colour-coded map, much like the traffic maps now offered by Google.
… Tod Dykstra, [Streetline Networks'] chief executive, hopes eventually to create networks that monitor other bits of a city’s infrastructure too, including traffic flows, street lamps and water mains.
While it may seem like a relatively small matter, searching for parking spaces imposes huge costs on the infrastructure, environment and productivity of the city and its residents.
In a world where it is an order of magnitude easier, cheaper and faster to collect and process data for making decisions, how do our “rules of thumb” and traditional heuristics change?
