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22 The PCB Magazine • November 2015 be innovators like Amphenol Printed Circuits, led by Pam Simonds and Christine Harrington, who are collaborating with materials suppliers to design next generation systems and patented technology for high-speed data rates, as well as taking a disruptive look at traditional indus- tries like commercial aviation where they share a passionate vision around the possibility to improve safety through the adoption of high- reliability PCBs. Projects like Open Compute provide an open source platform for "vanity-free" servers (Figure 8) that will be embraced by companies like Facebook and Microsoft who see their soft- ware and not their hardware as the competitive advantage. All of these segments will come together to create the unique vision of the IoT. The aggre- gate data that is collected through the IoT will allow analytics, correlations and understanding of things that today stand in the unexplainable column. Knowing all this, should I be worried about Skynet and the end of the human race? The answer to that question is, a little. Noted futurist Raymond Kurzweil, who is now funded by Google to implement his vision, de- scribes his law of accelerating returns, which predicts an exponential increase in technolo- gies like computers, genetics, nanotechnolo- gy, robotics and artificial intelligence. Kurzweil believes this will lead to a technological singu- larity in the year 2045, a point where progress is so rapid it outstrips humans' ability to compre- hend it. Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil says that machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intel- ligence combined. So, has Google become Skynet (Figure 9)? At least in the near term, we can seek comfort in the fact that Google has an unofficial motto of "Don't be evil" in everything they do. This should guide them not to become Skynet. That, of course, presupposes that humans are still in charge in the data centers. In the meantime, we will have a lot of circuit boards to build and technology challenges to overcome in order to get there. PCB Jason Marsh is vice president of product management at Insulectro. Figure 9: excerpt from google vs. Skynet cartoon. puTTing iT All TogeTher WHAT IS THe InTerneT oF THInGS AnD WHy SHoULD IT MATTer To US?