Cybernetics, Complexity, and the Challenges to the Realization of the Internet-of-Things

The realization of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) is a concept that is increasingly discussed as the result of networking a variety of “smart” electronic systems together to achieve high levels of automation and performance. Thus, the IoT is envisioned to enable everything from automated toast buttering for breakfast to fleets of autonomous vehicles co-existing on roads with human piloted vehicles and cooperating with their drivers. However, as more and more systems are linked together to form directed, acknowledged, collaborative, and virtual Systems-of-Systems (SoS), the exercise of control becomes problematic. Emergent properties, hostile agents, evolutionary and adaptive development, and other characteristics of systems will enable complex behaviors in SoS that are not part of the constituent systems. If information theory and cybernetics laws are not considered in the construction of SoS as part of the IoT, then the behaviors that will emerge can have destabilizing outcomes.