Besides blockchain, what's missing from the internet of things?

Brand-new global information infrastructure design doesn't come along every day. The internet of things (IoT) presents a rare opportunity to build global information infrastructure from scratch -- a new, more expansive, and capable set of functions on the periphery of what already exists. But the truly new IoT that's expected is only now emerging. At the moment, what's being developed is really just a nervous system of sorts -- protocols, communications pathways, local processing and storage, endpoints embedded in various places, and ways for things to talk to and interpret one another. But what would the things say to each other?