The Internet of Anything and Sustainability

T wo terms have all but surpassed the cliché stage in our current lexicon: the Internet of Things (IoT) and sustainability. The notion of the IoT, or the Internet of Anything (IoA),1 as we prefer to call it, is widely prevalent. Taken to extremes, the IoA subsumes drones, smart swarms, the smart grid, intelligent buildings, and autonomous cyber-physical and cyber-biological systems, each of which has achieved or is about to achieve mega-cliché status on its own merit. The IoA is supported by the cloud, big data, mobile computing, and bring your own device (BYOD). By entirely different semantic channels, the notion of “sustainability”—of our environment, our growth, our social well-being, and our economy—has also reached worldwide cliché status. Together with resilience, the concept of sustainability demands an urgent call to action. The IoA and sustainability, taken as coevolving concepts, nonetheless result in some useful speculation about the art of the possible. This convergence is occurring in a world that can no longer be viewed in terms of often mechanistic and static precision characteristics, as was the thinking of our recently industrialized era. This special issue examines and reinforces this vital union and explores its potential. IoA and Sustainability: Coevolution Given that the world’s scientists place a collective 97.2 percent level of confidence on the concept of climate change and all that it implies,2 sustainability becomes a metaphor for coping with new dynamics of unknown dimensions. Speculation abounds concerning increasingly unusual and often violent weather in the most unexpected places, unprecedented drought and wildfires in other unlikely places, food instability, pandemics, and growing disparities leading to constant global unrest, hostility, and disruption. Although we are only glimpsing the forerunners of dramatic change, the early signs are present and seemingly deepening with the passage of time. Is there hope for achieving true sustainability? And what does this have to do with the IoA? In the face of massive disruptive technological change, some might argue that the status quo has no foothold. Certainly, the electronic book, for example, has led to the demise of many venerable bookstores. iTunes forever changed the landscape of popular music. Nonetheless, the timehonored acts of reading books and consuming music continue apace. Only the distribution channels were disrupted, not literate or auditory behavior. Sustainability then implies a shift in Guest editors’ introduction