By 2025 there will probably be a trillion sensors on the planet. It’s not an exact figure, but for Chris Slater it hardly matters: they’re going to outnumber humans by orders of magnitude. What matters more to the author of ‘Sensing Machines’ is that the public – who are becoming more reliant on the interconnected world of sensing devices – don’t really understand them.
“People still think of sensors as devices that will steal their data. But they’re just transducers that take a signal out of the world and change it into another form of energy so that a computer can read it.” What people are thinking of, he says, is the machines connected to the sensors; they’re thinking about the corporations that harvest data to create wealth.
For Salter, sensors are the bridge that provides the interface between the digital and human worlds. “Think of it like a human body,” he says. “The functions of the sensors – the eyes, ears, skin and so on – make no sense unless...