Customer Reviews

Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence (The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology)

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If you can imagine a world where every manufactured device can communicate with every other one, where all human activity and history is monitored and recorded, and where decision-making is primarily the task of computing machines rather than humans, then this would approximate the world of `ambient intelligence' that is the topic of this book. The title of course reveals a bias in the attitudes of the editors regarding the future development and deployment of this type of technology, but they still manage to give the reader a good overview of the relevant issues. As one of them stated in the forward to the book, its contents are a balance between technophilia and technophobia, but readers embedded in these extreme endpoints along with ones in between will be exposed to insightful commentary on many different scenarios that could arise in a world of ambient intelligence. The legal frameworks in which the contributors argue are mostly geared toward those found in the European union, but their examples could be adapted to those countries that have less central control.

As expected, issues of privacy dominate the discussions in the book, as do warnings on the "Orwellian" nature of ambient intelligence. But the contributors also discuss the ramifications that arise because of possible mistakes that could be made by the technology as it performs its everyday functions. The editors are aware that intelligence, whether human or otherwise, is not "full proof and incapable of error", and so there must be contingency plans in place that will be able to deal with these types of events. Too many mistakes in too short a time will cause many to reject this technology, either before or after its deployment. It is therefore of great interest to those who are going to offer it to work in symbiosis with regulatory and governmental agencies to insure the friendliness and compatibility of ambient intelligence with human desires and needs.

In today's world one can find "microscopic" examples of the hypothetical scenarios discussed in the book. Credit reporting agencies, with their frequent distortions or omissions of key facts are one example of the large degree of irritation that one can encounter with data collection. Another is embedded chips in automobiles that collect information that can be used to reconstruct events that the owner may believe is private. Still another example are traffic surveillance cameras that take photos of motorists who are deemed to be driving over the speed limit, etc. The list goes on, and one therefore can easily imagine how ambient intelligence might both be a blessing and a curse. Imagining to what degree it could is assisted greatly by the reading of this book.