Forget the Internet of Things. That is already passé and I saw something yesterday that made me realize we have now moved on to the Internet of Everywhere.

Tostitos has put out a special ‘party bag’ of chips for the SuperBowl. The bag contains a chip and a tiny sensor that can detect traces of alcohol on your breath when you breathe on it. If you test as intoxicated the bag will light up red and flash “Don’t Drink and Drive.” But that’s only the beginning. If you set off the red flash you can tap the bag against your smartphone and it will automatically call Uber and give you a $10 discount on your ride.

This is obviously a super-cool marketing idea and I expect the company to sell lots of bags of chips and will get a lot of positive press. And I would expect a lot of people will strive to make the bag flash red. But this demonstrates how cheap computer chips have become when a company can design a campaign using millions of chips in throwaway bags for a one-time promotion. This goes to show how amazingly small sensors have become that this bag can give you a mini-breathalyzer. I’m sure the test is not super-accurate, but the very fact that it can do this and still be affordable is amazing.

Engineers have been predicting this sort of technology for a few years. For example, there are now chips that can be printed onto human skin and can act as a keypad for your smartphone. We are not far away from having chips printed on every grocery item in the store, which will simplify checkout and will fully automate inventory control. With cheap chips we can literally sprinkle sensors throughout a farm field to cheaply monitor for the localized need for water, fertilizer or the presence of pests.

The real Internet of Things isn’t going to be unleashed until we can develop affordable swarms of sensors and also provide a way for them to communicate with each other. Today the IoT is being used mainly to monitor factory production and in homes for alarm monitoring and other similar functions. But the revolutionary value of IoT will come when it can grow to be the Internet of Everywhere.

Then we can have constant monitors inside our blood stream to sense for diseases and to fight them off early. We can monitor sensitive environmental areas to protect endangered wildlife. We can monitor our homes to a degree never done before – want to know if a mouse just snuck in – done!

There have been a lot of breakthroughs in creating small, low-power sensors. But the real challenge is still to find a way to communicate easily and reliably with a cloud of sensors. We are not going to be able to create a WiFi path with a thousand different home sensors but will need some sort of mesh technology that can first collect and make sense of what the sensors are telling us.

But I have no doubt that if a potato chip bag can tell me if I’ve had too much to drink and can then call for a ride to take me home, that we are making great progress.

And as I write this blog I’m sitting here thinking of if only I could show this bag to one of my long-passed grandparents. What would they ever make of this flashing chip bag, of my smartphone and of Uber? But then again, perhaps their biggest question might first be, “What is a Tostito?”