Abstract
What if we began to speculate that intelligent things have an ethical agenda? Could we then imagine ways to move past the moral divide ‘human vs. nonhuman’ in those contexts, where things act on our behalf? Would this help us better address matters of agency and responsibility in the design and use of intelligent systems? In this article, we argue that if we fail to address intelligent things as objects that deserve moral consideration by their relations within a broad social context, we will lack a grip on the distinct ethical rules governing our interaction with intelligent things, and how to design for it. We report insights from a workshop, where we take seriously the perspectives offered by intelligent things, by allowing unforeseen ethical situations to emerge in an improvisatory manner. By giving intelligent things an active role in interaction, our participants seemed to be activated by the artifacts, provoked to act and respond to things beyond the artifact itself—its direct functionality and user experience. The workshop helped to consider autonomous behavior not as a simplistic exercise of anthropomorphization, but within the more significant ecosystems of relations, practices and values of which intelligent things are a part.
Highlights
Today’s smart video doorbells use facial recognition to allow strangers into private homes, fitness trackers use deep learning to detect one’s pregnancy, and feminized digital voice assistants use natural language processing to obediently and intimately serve
What if we began to speculate that such intelligent things have an ethical agenda? Could we imagine ways to move past the moral divide between ‘human vs. nonhuman’ in contexts, where things are meant to act on our behalf? Would this help us better address matters of agency and responsibility in the design and use of intelligent systems?
1 Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden 2 Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands 3 California College of the Arts, San Francisco, USA 4 Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden In this article, we propose a way of doing Research through Design that enables designers to critically consider the effects of interacting with intelligent things in everyday life, and bring into view the ethical implications of those effects for design
Summary
Today’s smart video doorbells use facial recognition to allow strangers into private homes, fitness trackers use deep learning to detect one’s pregnancy, and feminized digital voice assistants use natural language processing to obediently and intimately serve. What if we began to speculate that such intelligent things have an ethical agenda? Could we imagine ways to move past the moral divide between ‘human vs nonhuman’ in contexts, where things are meant to act on our behalf? Would this help us better address matters of agency and responsibility in the design and use of intelligent systems?. We propose a way of doing Research through Design that enables designers to critically consider the effects of interacting with intelligent things in everyday life, and bring into view the ethical implications of those effects for design. We illustrate our approach with the outcomes of a workshop we organized at the Research Through Design 2019 conference in Delft, Netherlands (Reddy et al 2019)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
