New Study: 'Cloud Of Things' Could Make Customer Service Better, Humanity Worse

Experts predict technology will improve daily transactions by 2025, but there are major caveats...

...The Cloud of Things is the term used to describe the way machines will use our digital data—untethered to any single device or platform—to communicate with one another. So while a smartphone is the device for sensing and viewing and networking,  the Cloud of Things is digital information "about the things, and their inter-communication and sense-making patterns," McKnight said.

McKnight is one of more than 2,500 experts who responded to a call for predictions about how this already-forming Cloud of Things will change the way we live by the year 2025. Some 83 percent of those experts agreed that the Cloud of Things will have "widespread and beneficial" effects in the next 10 years. But many were wary, too.

On one hand, daily transactions of the near future could be made much smoother by networked architecture that restructures many of our interactions. For instance, when intelligence and connectivity is free from individual devices and maintained in a cloud tied to personal data, the way we communicate with companies and individuals could fundamentally change...