Mud’s feet giants

Few months ago, was held in Barcelona the Mobile World Congress, with public and critics success, according to the classic expression. Indeed Internet is revolutionizing the economy, and our lives. But it must be remembered that, along with virtual worlds, the real world coexists, with real problems that come with humanity since the dawn of time.

The gurus of this neo-science that we know as IKT (Information and Knowledge Technologies) are selling the ‘Internet of things’ to us. Today we are nothing without Internet. Even things to be somewhat need the Internet connectivity, otherwise, what kind of things are, or want to be? Let’s look at an example: in cars we used to assess motor torque depending on the r.p.m. Now that is outdated; new vehicle buyers choose depending on its Internet connection, and its speed (in Kilobytes / second). We look for 3G, 4G, or higher speeds.

The ‘Internet of things’ is also campaigning in favor of the fridge connected to the net of nets. In the cybernetic society there’s no time to control if we run out of our ham turkey supply. Therefore, we need the fridge to be a smart one and thus avoiding breakage of stock by connecting with our supermarket and forwarding the relevant orders.

All this is fantastic and, although we look at it with some hilarity, we think it contributes to the progress of civilization. However, it is desirable not to get intoxicated by technology and relaxing the permanent alertness status.

Going into the preventive field, we admit that the fridge –or industrial cold storage system- connected to the Internet can greatly simplify management, for example, in a food processing industry (a manufacturer of prepared salads, for concreteness), optimizing it for logistics requirements, or others. But what does it serve any food industry to have a cybernetic cold storage system if it stores contaminated products due to poor or inaccurate handling?

Technology (Internet of things) and virtual worlds cannot lead us to forget that some tiny molecular corpuscles (bacteria) have enough power as to make us fall, making clear that, if they stand in our way, they can cut our rush of crazy giants with clay feet. In other words, any food industry that boasts itself will be thoroughly concerned about the healthiness of its product. Both the health of its workers and that of the consumers are at stake due to possible toxic infections. Fixed that aspect, they will always have the Internet of the things as an additional option.

Unarmed in front to bacteria
Bacteria -in its biodiverse variety- kill humans in the real world. The paradigm -recent and pitiless- can be found in the death of Pau, the six years old child, from Olot (Girona - Spain), defeated by diphtheria after his fruitless struggle of a month. We should not forget that bacteria exist and also kill in internet’s times.

Read the Spanish version