This paper analyzes ethical aspects of the new paradigm of Ambient Intelligence, which is a combination of Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’s). After an introduction to the approach, two key ethical dimensions will be analyzed: freedom and privacy. It is argued that Ambient Intelligence, though often designed to enhance freedom and control, has the potential to limit freedom and autonomy as well. Ambient Intelligence also harbors great privacy risks, and these are explored as well.

A controversial scientific vision predicts a time in which humans and machines will merge and create a new form of non-biological intelligence, explaining how the occurrence will solve such issues as pollution, hunger, and aging.

GIS has captured planning practice to an unprecedented degree, and this article on how it reconfigures and is configured by institutional context. The author inquires into GIS as a technology for incorporating knowledge into institutional use and includes five propositions: GIS's efficiencies in data processing allows it unprecedented facility and scope of analysis, its use increases alienation, its mimetic language furthers its role in planning, its logic appears rational—purposive, but it conceals an underlying normative logic, and its most profound effect (...) is on the mapper, and the alienating and normative character of GIS necessitate new modes of “social ground-truthing.” The author studies the southeast Los Angeles initiatives to demonstrate these propositions. This article compares two studies: one GIS-based, and the other based on participatory action research and discusses how GIS might be recontextualized into a technology for liberating democratizing processes. (shrink)

This paper identifies the unprecedented challenges that the prospects of an `ambient intelligence' era raise from the points of view of `privacy' and data protection. Privacy and data protection are identified, in line with Agre's conceptualization, as complementary and interdependent legal instruments aimed at preserving the individual freedom to build one's own personality without excessive constrains and influences, and to control some aspects of one's identity that one projects on the world. The `performativity' and the distribution of agency that characterize (...) AmI systems are exposed as transversal concerns that threaten the fundamental value grounding both privacy and data protection laws: respect for individual autonomy. The relevance, applicability and adequacy of the European privacy and data protection legal frameworks to deal with those unprecedented challenges are then assessed. That assessment required the rethinking of the scope and the normative grounds of what is meant by the `right to privacy.' Privacy, it is argued, is an instrument for fostering the specific yet changing autonomic capabilities of individuals that are, in a given society at a given time, necessary for sustaining a vivid democracy. What those needed capabilities are is obviously contingent both on the characteristics of the constituency considered, and on the state of the technological, economic and social forces that must be weighed against each other through the operation of legislative balancing. Capacity for both reflexive autonomy allowing one to resist social pressures to conform with dominant drifts, and for deliberative abilities allowing one to participate in deliberative processes are arguably among the skills that a vivid democracy needs citizens to have in the circumstances of our times. The value of privacy today, it will be argued, resides in the support it provides for individuals to develop those aptitudes. Acknowledging both the `intermediate' value of privacy, and its `social-structural' value, the paper aims at clarifying the conceptual intricacies characterizing privacy and data protection, in view of the emerging challenges raised by the exponential development of information and communication technologies on the threshold of an `ambient intelligence era.' Finally the applicability of the European data protection scheme to the types of data processing involved in Ambient Intelligence, and the compatibility of the technical visions embedded in those systems with the fundamental data protection principles, are critically explored. (shrink)

This book develops some of the most important themes of Sen's works over the last decade. He argues in a rich and subtle approach that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than their resources or welfare.