Lots of industrial machinery, of course, already has sensors, but right now the connectivity enabled by those sensors is the equivalent of trying to communicate with two tin cans and a piece of string. A typical oil rig, for instance, has thirty thousand sensors, but usually only 1 percent of the information generated by those sensors is examined in any meaningful way because those sensors are fairly single-minded—they’re just trying to detect individual anomalies, not optimize the system as a whole or peer around corners to make predictions.
