• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, July 4, 2016

People sometimes can put too much trust in the technology that drives the Internet of Things.

The reality is that even the greatest technology is prone to some form of glitch or failure at some point.

And it’s not always that the technology doesn’t work; it sometimes is that it doesn’t always work as expected. Sometimes it’s also an issue of the amount of trust a human puts in the technology.

The widely reported recent fatal accident by a Tesla driver using the car’s Autopilot system may be an example of both.

It has not yet been determined whether the DVD player police found in the car was playing at the time of the crash, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating.

Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied, according to Tesla.

The impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S, killing the driver.

Tesla points out that this is the first known fatality in more than 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated.

A technology failure may be rare, but it will occur.

Tech leaders in big businesses are familiar with the term ‘five nines’ referring to high availabilirty of services, like networks, that are promised to work 99.999% of the time. That’s a lot of time, but not all of it.

The Internet of Things for a long time will be a work in progress with various components that are far from perfect.

One of the IoT promises is that it will create new opportunities for marketing and media, including added free time to consume media, such as when transportation is more automated.

Many of the technology trust failures will be small or just annoying. For example:

• A fitness tracker or smartphone may work perfectly, until the battery dies.
• Connected thermostats work all the time, until a software update causes some of them to fail.
• Connected TVs and streaming video work all the time, until that big storm.

A Verizon installer recently told me that he had a customer who was panicking because her Internet was down and she had a totally connected home, including door locks, heating and air conditioning and some appliances, leaving her pretty much dead in the water.

She asked him if he could install another network that would work for her whenever her Internet connection failed. He found the situation to be slightly amusing.

The Internet of Things will involve more than 20 billion Internet-connected devices.

A big challenge will be keeping all of those connected things working.

A much bigger challenge will be managing the expectations of the users of all of those devices.

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Looking for insights into wearables? Come hear Chuck Fletcher of Razorfish, Ben Gaddis of T3 and Marley Kaplan of Kinetic Worldwide at the MediaPost IoT Marketing Forum Aug. 3 in New York. Check it out the agenda here.