Welcome to the era of hyperconnectivity - a world where we are all time travellers living in the next dimension!
— Jim Carroll
The opportunity
Create a vast network of intelligent devices (Internet of Things) that can communicate and share data, enabling smarter systems, automated processes, and more informed decision-making in all aspects of life.
From “Daily Inspiration: “Welcome to the era of hyperconnectivity - a world where we are all time travellers living in the next dimension!”” (January 2020)
That’s because your appliances are becoming smart, hyperconnected, and achieve the magic of what we call ‘prognostic diagnostics.’ It’s a world in which everything around us is becoming connected, plugged in, aware. That’s the theme today in my series Insight 2020 Series, Leadership Strategies for the Era of Acceleration - “Rethink your product!”
A world of massive hyperconnectivity means that everything around us is becoming connected to the Internet - you’ll know it as the “Internet of Things.” While it provides us with some really fascinating products - smart doorbells, connected thermostats and more - there is a more profound trend at work.
Cars and trucks are becoming hyperconnected rolling data platforms on wheels, generating vast amounts of information. Medical devices are being embedded with connectivity and intelligence to such a degree that their actual function begins to change, providing far more insight than they used to. Wind farms begin to anticipate weather pattern changes far in advance, and proactively begin to plan their future.
From “Hyperconnectivity — 1998 and on…” (May 2007)
And also, one astute blog reader and researcher asked, and I responded. Yes, it is true: Nortel did provide copies of one of my books to shareholders in attendance at their annual meeting in Ottawa, May 2000, and asked my co-author and I to attend. They even had a little table for us. The book was Light Bulbs to Yottabits: How to Profit by Understanding the Internet of tbe Future . It’s out of print now, but had some fascinating stuff on connectivity and such. It makes for fascinating reading in retrospect. And yes, I also hosted a national radio show for Nortel during 2000 to 2001 … so it’s not like these guys don’t know me…
But this is an age of hyperconnectivity , where any number of terminal devices can use a variety of wireline or wireless access forms to carry their voice, data or multimedia traffic to any terminal device on the globe. The Internet is the newest option available for backbone transport, and anyone in the business of carrying messages for hire must figure out how this potentially powerful means of transport affects their business.
The above features, although compelling on their own, must be successfully integrated with each other to create the killer application. ” Hyperconnectivity” between these features will become crucial, as the killer application must be able to seamlessly link previously unrelated events and make this information relevant to the user .
From “Decoding Tomorrow: 30 Megatrends - #2 : Ambient Intelligence - ""AI is the invisible architect dissolving computing into the very fabric of our lives.”” (June 2025)
This trend is kind of near and dear to my heart since I’ve been speaking and writing about it for almost three decades - albeit in the context of what I call ” hyperconnectivity .” And back in 2000, in one of the many Internet-related books I was writing at the time, I introduced the concept of the “IP-chip”—a visionary idea of a computer microchip with built-in Internet capabilities, designed to enable seamless global communication between everyday devices.
This wasn’t just about connecting gadgets; it was about embedding the Internet’s universal language, Internet Protocol (IP), directly into the fabric of our world. My predictions (and obviously I wasn;‘t the only one making this one) proved remarkably prescient, laying the conceptual groundwork for what we now widely recognize as the Internet of Things (IoT).
Even so, it’s going to happen, My original predictions suggested that these devices would possess a degree of “intelligence ,” but I didn’t anticipate the massive acceleration of all trends related to AI. Thinking about it now, it seems that AI will provide the ” brain ” for this vast network of connected devices, transforming mere connectivity into true ” smartness .” This integration, now referred to as AIoT, enables devices to learn from data, make autonomous decisions, and automate tasks at a scale and speed far beyond what we can do. It allows for real-time data analysis, informed decision-making, and continuous performance improvement by learning from patterns.
Read the full pieces on jimcarroll.com:
Daily Inspiration: “Welcome to the era of hyperconnectivity - a world where we are all time travellers living in the next dimension!”
Hyperconnectivity — 1998 and on…
Decoding Tomorrow: 30 Megatrends - #2 : Ambient Intelligence - ""AI is the invisible architect dissolving computing into the very fabric of our lives.”