SmartSociety: Collaboration Between Humans and Machines, Promises and Perils

Overview & Synopsis

As the European Union (EU) funded SmartSociety project aims to create a toolset for rapidly and systematically engineering collective intelligence systems to support daily living, it simultaneously wants to ameliorate the risks to individuals of participating in these types of hyper-connected digital systems. This paper reports on a panel session at the close at of the 2015 IFIP summer school that reflected upon a keynote speech covering SmartSociety concepts, technologies and ethical dilemmas. The panel session was conceived as a consultative exercise as part of the ongoing Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approach embedded within the SmartSociety project. In this chapter we present an analysis of the panel session discussion, which touched on several key issues, including the relationships between technology and society, what we should expect from a ‘SmartSociety’, barriers and horizons in managing ethical issues, and brokerage as a methodological approach to weaving multiple perspectives into design.