Story
Year 2050:
On a winter morning, Tim wakes up to the smell of toast cooking in his LifeBot smart toaster. His LifeBot virtual AI assistant, Charlie, greets him: “Good Morning Tim! Today it is 35 degrees and cloudy. You have a meeting at 9am and there are currently seven parking spaces available outside your office building.” Tim drags himself out of bed and gets ready for work.
LifeBot is a massive tech company which rapidly gained popularity over the last 3 years for its vast line of connected IoT devices that can perform a multitude of everyday tasks. LifeBot has three major product lines for businesses, households, and smart cities. Tim lives in a LifeBot operated smart city and smart home. He loves how well his home devices integrate with the smart city.
Running late for his meeting, Tim rushes out to his self-driving car to head for work. The car is already running and has picked its destination for the closest available parking spot to the entrance of Tim’s work building. The car takes him on a different route to work today and he assumes it must be avoiding an accident or other traffic along the normal route. When Tim gets to the office, no one is at their desks. He goes to the break room and finds everyone watching the news and frantically checking their phones. “What’s going on?” he asks his co-worker. She replies, “LifeBot had a data breach this morning. I heard it only affected the business management devices but this could mean that our personal data was breached as well. Either way, we can’t do much work today until it all gets sorted out.” Realizing how much personal data LifeBot technology has collected on him, Tim’s stomach drops.
What are Distributed Robotic Systems?
Distributed robotic systems are systems of robots linked through a network, such as the web, for data sharing and cooperative learning and working [4]. Distributed robotic systems can be multi-robot systems in which self-organizing robot teams work in coordination to perform specific tasks [4]. These systems can also include networked intelligence systems such as the smart city described in the story above. Smart cities can have a mixture of networked devices such as weather monitoring systems and robotic systems such as robotic police officers. With robots becoming increasingly advanced, smart cities will likely integrate more robotic technologies in the future.
Distributed robotic systems are becoming further integrated into society as the market for Internet of Things technology, such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home, grows and Web speeds improve [4]. This is a popular field of research because there are many benefits to using a system of many robots working together. Multi-robot systems are more adaptable because they are not designed for one specific task. They are also more reliable because if one robot becomes damaged, the rest of the system remains intact. They are also very useful for large scale applications because they have a wider field of view. While an individual robot can only gather information from its immediate surroundings, robots that are part of a system can access information from its own surroundings as well as the surroundings of other robots in the system. An example of this is military microdrones which communicate with each other on intelligence gathering missions.
Discussion Questions
Click the + on the right of a question to view related perspectives and potential starting points for considering these ethical concerns.
Is Tim aware of what data LifeBot is collecting about him?
- “Notice and consent—considered the cornerstone of data and privacy protection—are significantly weakened within smart city technologies and in data/urban science becoming an empty exercise or being entirely absent. Individuals interact with a number of smart city technologies on a daily basis, each of which is generating data about them.”[2]
Is any personally identifiable information being collected on Tim? How is anonymity maintained? [2]
- “One of the key strategies for ensuring individual privacy is anonymization, either through the use of pseudonyms, aggregation or other strategies. The generation of big data and new computational techniques, however, can make the re-identification of data relatively straightforward in many cases” [2]
Could LifeBot be selling Tim’s data for purposes such as custom advertising and has Tim consented to the use of his data in this way? [5]
- “By loading the banner ad, a cookie is placed on the web user’s computer. In this way, online advertising companies are also able to track (part of) a user’s movements on the web.” [5]
How does custom advertising limit free choice or shape the culture and values of society?
Could the government get access to data collected from LifeBot technologies? Could mass surveillance of the people by the government be a threat to democracy or civil liberties? [1]
- “On the other hand, human rights organizations are legitimately concerned about mass surveillance as a threat to civil liberties. A corrupt government can get to know your every move, habit, medical problem, and other private detail.”[1]
What laws should there be to protect Tim’s privacy and rights?
How do smart technologies in cities and homes improve the quality of life for the citizens currently and how will they in the future? To what extent is it worth sacrificing personal data privacy for convenience? [3]
- “People who live in smart cities or who are visiting smart cities have the immediate benefit of being connected to the governing body for information and services. The quality of their lives can be improved with better traffic management, waste removal, snow removal, and more.” [3]
How could a data breach or cyber attack impact the people? How secure is the data being collected? [1, 4]
- “for instance, the increasing dependability of primary services from complex systems, and the unpredictability of robot team behavior.”[4]
- “Some government systems are simply corrupt to the point they cannot guarantee decent protection of their citizens’ personal data.”[1]
How does mass data collection lead to deindividualization when people are constantly grouped into categories based on their data? [5]
- “When group profiles are used as a basis for decision-making and formulating policies, or if profiles somehow become public knowledge, the individuality of people is threatened. People will be judged and treated as group members rather than individuals.” [5]
Smart cities are beginning to integrate roboticized police forces. What human biases are present in roboticized policing, considering that the machine learning algorithms used for profiling were trained using data from an already biased law enforcement system? [1]
- “In 2016, a coalition of US civil rights organizations picked predictive policing apart with a joint statement describing the technology as “biased against communities of color.”[1]
Themes
(Primary) Human Right, Safety and Security, Promotion of Human Values, Government, Fairness and Non-discrimination
(Secondary) Identity, Transparency and Explainability
Resources
- Ethical issues of smart city tech and how to solve them. (2020, February 27). Retrieved November 19, 2020, from https://intetics.com/blog/ethical-issues-of-smart-city-tech-and-how-to-solve-them
- Kitchin, R. (2016). The ethics of smart cities and urban science. Philosophical Transactions. Series A, Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, 374(2083). doi:10.1098/rsta.2016.0115
- Maddox, T. (2018, July 16). Smart cities: A cheat sheet. Retrieved November 19, 2020, from https://www.techrepublic.com/article/smart-cities-the-smart-persons-guide/
- Siciliano, B., & Khatib, O. (2016). Springer handbook of robotics. Berlin: Springer, p.1514. https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007%2F978-3-540-30301-5
- Van Wel, L., & Royakkers, L. (2004). Ethical issues in web data mining. Ethics and Information Technology, 6, 129-140. Retrieved December 2, 2020, from https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.467.312&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
Image Credit
Creator: “Mahashreveta Choudhary ”—https://www.geospatialworld.net/author/mahashreveta-2/
Source: “Technology – The backbone of a smart city”—https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/technology-the-backbone-of-a-smart-city/
License: “CC BY-SA 4.0”—https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Test comment on distributed robotics page