Understanding Ethical Issues of Emerging AmI Technologies in Europe (A Framework)

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is an information technology approach that is interactive, sensitive and responsive to a user’s environment. Emerging AmI technologies are intended to be intelligent and intuitive to a user’s needs and therefore embedded into a user’s everyday life without so much as being obtrusive. However, with any emergent technology such as AmI, ethical concerns arise. It would be desirable to have a better understanding of future technological developments, and in this case, AmI technological developments in order to allow ethical considerations to influence design and implementations of the technologies. However, the unavoidable contingency of future developments provides a fundamental limit to what we can know about the future. With this, this paper attempts to explore how this problem can be addressed by providing a framework of technical developments which include AmI technology developments that one can reasonably expect to materialise in the medium term future of 10 to 15 years and ethical issues that are currently expected to arise within the European Union (EU). This is done by analysing current European research funding documents with a view to exploring the trends, purposes, applications, artefacts, ethical issues, and governance structures that the European Commission foresees. The overall aim of the paper is to provide the conceptual basis of this framework.