The problem is that most people have and decided that its pretty useless. When LG launched the worlds first internet fridge back in June 2000, it bombed. Hardly surprising considering it retailed for over $20,000 and the problems it allegedly solved weren't considered problems by most people.
Take the humble 2 litre (4 pint) carton of milk for example, your not going to use it all in one go and you can see at a glance how much is left. Alternately each time you open the 'smart' fridge it has to be scanned in and out and weighted to estimate how much is left. The chances are more than one person is going to be using the fridge and multiple items will be coming in and out all the time. So using your fridge becomes like using the self-checkout at the supermarket. That's before we even consider that bag of apples you unwrapped or lose peppers you tossed in the salad drawer. Since there's no barcode you'll be keying these in and out manually.
So when the IoT finally arrives and leads us to the promised land of 50 billion devices seamlessly connected to the internet, talking to each other and generating vast amounts of data about us, I thinks its safe to say that your fridge is going to be the one left sulking in the corner. So how will the IoT of things effect us?
Clearly its not going to happen overnight and it will take time to build the infrastructure and as our example of the fridge demonstrates adoption will be driven by whether or not the benefits outweigh the costs. In industry this means the rise of what's been called the smart factory. A factory run by computers that manage production logistics and supply chains. Industrial robots that monitor their own performance and schedule preventative maintenance before they break down.
If all this sounds like science fiction consider this. Siemens Electronic Works facility in Amberg, Germany, is a 108,000-square-foot high-tech facility of smart machines that coordinate the production and global distribution of the company’s Simatic control devices. A built-to-order process involving more than 1.6 billion components, using 10,000 materials from 250 suppliers to make the plant’s 950 different products.
Closer to home modern central heating boilers flash up an error code when they fail, so the next logical step will be for them to predict rather than react to failure. They'll schedule in preventative maintenance, put the appointment in your diary and send you a reminder. And given that the drums just gone in my washing machine and I've got to wait 10 days for a replacement, it would be a nifty feature to have on a washing machine too!
Talking of which its been suggested that if start individually tagging items like items with RFID tags, washing machines will be able to read them and automatically programme themselves. Although that one raises some interesting privacy issues. Imagine someone being able to scan you as you walk down the street and determine what brand of underwear your wearing.
Also I'd imagine that once autonomous vehicles start to take over our roads they'll be doing all sorts of other things than just transporting us like monitoring the condition of the roads, scanning, mapping and automatically reporting potholes.
In fact if you bring together an app like uber with autonomous vehicles you remove the need to own a car at all. I recall some research a while back that suggested there were 24 million cars in the UK and at any given moment only 1 million were on the road, the other 23 million being parked up somewhere slowly deprecating as they quietly rust away. Imagine instead paying a monthly fee, like a lease, you tell the associated app on your smartphone where and when you want to go and it automatically books a computerised car for you. A smart car which takes you work then whizzes off to do someone else's school run. No deprecation, insurance, or a thousand and one other things you have to worry about if you own a car.
About the only thing you'll have to do yourself is unload your shopping and stick it in that sulky little fridge, although in time I'm sure there'll be a robot who can do that for you as well.