NASA’s exploding RoboSimian shows how easily your Tesla Powerwall can turn into a bomb
No one is connecting the dots between IoT cyber risk and Li-Ion battery failure – and it’s time we started doing so


	Shocking footage of NASA explosion shows dangers of large Li-Ion powerpacks
	Internet of Things cyber risk poses threat to safety of products like Tesla Powerwall
	Focus of chip design set to shift from power and energy efficiency to security


Curation Comment:

The video footage of a large bionic monkey in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab shows very vividly that happens when you have not one Li-Ion battery to go wrong in isolation, as in a Samsung Note 7 phone, but one Li-Ion battery go wrong in the middle of 96 others. Like in… a Tesla Powerwall.


Rechargeable powerpacks are controlled by smart meters that can detect when the battery is full and switch the current off accordingly so that they do not overheat. Increasingly, such smart meters are connected to the Internet. Last week’s IoT-facilitated cyber attack has made the world far more aware of the vulnerabilities inherent in the vast majority of internet-enabled products currently being introduced to the market. So what happens when a similar attack hacks Powerwall smart meters and disables them, allowing all the Powerwalls in California to continue charging until they got hot enough to burn?


There’s a fair amount of boosterism in Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son’s recent claim that the internet of things will grow to 1 trillion devices – he was after all speaking at the event at which his company’s recent acquisition, ARM, launched two secure processor designs for IoT devices. But there’s no doubt that with chips reaching their capacity limits and Moore’s Law slowing in the face of the rather more fundmental laws of physics, we’re going to see a shift away from processors focussed on raw computational power and energy efficiency towards ones more focussed on security.
 

ARM’s partners shipped more than 15 billion in 2015, generating $50 billion in chip sales. But Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank, and new owner of ARM after September’s $31 billion acquisition deal, said in a keynote speech at the annual ARM developers conference that you haven’t seen anything yet.

At the opening of ARM TechCon in Santa Clara, California today, Son said he expects the Internet of Things (IoT), or enabling everyday objects to be smart and connected, will lead to an explosion of new technologies — just like the Cambrian Explosion enabled thousands of new species on Earth — that will lead to 1 trillion connected IoT devices. And that will lead to The Singularity, when machine intelligence exceeds the collective intelligence of humans, Son said.

Son started his speech with a slide on evolution. He noted that the trilobite was the first creature on Earth that had eyes, or the ability to sense and process the environment. And that creature lived during the Cambrian Explosion, a period around 500 million years ago, when thousands of species were born.

“The Internet of Things explosion is coming,” he said. “If the Cambrian Explosion happened, so too will the Internet of Things explosion happen.”

By 2018, the number of Internet of Things devices will surpass the number of mobile devices, he said. By 2021, we’ll have 1.8 billion PCs, 8.6 billion mobile devices, and 15.7 billion IoT devices, he said.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

“More important, in the next 20 years, we will see 1 trillion Internet of Things devices,” he said.

By 2035, he said, the amount of data will grow more than 2,400 times, from 1 exabyte to 2.3 zetabytes.

“This is the first time on the Earth we will experience 1 trillion chips aggregating all kinds of data,” he said. “We can aggregate all sorts of analytics. This will give us intelligence. That will make us super smart. Security will be essential. Security becomes more important than doubling the clock cycle. Without security, this becomes so dangerous.”

He noted that cars already have 1,000 chips, including hundreds of ARM chips, and none of them are secure. As cars become connected and driverless, they will be susceptible to hacker attacks. Someone could launch a virus and turn it on all at once and crash every car on the highway, Son said.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

“I shouldn’t talk too much,” he said. “We shouldn’t give too much hint to the bad guys.”

But he noted that speech and visual recognition of artificial intelligence is already surpassing that of humans. With 1 trillion devices, we’ll get “super AI,” Son said.

“This will become the super intelligence,” he said. “This will become the Singularity,” where machine intelligence exceeds the collective intelligence of humans.

When that happens, we’ll have a world where we can predict the future. There will be no car accidents. And we’ll live much longer, Son said.

“Some bad things could also be anticipated,” he said. “Whether we like it or not, this Cambrian Explosion is happening. Would you like to be on the side to be able to eat, or be eaten? We have to equip technology on our side. The one who evolves with this technology will make it happen.”