Abstract
Information technology is widely used to fulfill societal goals such as safety and security. These application areas put ever changing demands on the functionality of the technology. Designing technological appliances to be reconfigurable, thereby keeping them open to functionalities yet to be determined, will possibly allow the technology to fulfill these changing demands in an efficient way. In this paper we present a first exploration of potential societal and moral issues of reconfigurable sensors developed for application in the safety and security domain, in the context of a large scale R&D-project in the Netherlands. We discuss the subtle distinction between the relevant notions of reconfigurability, function creep, and unrestricted or unforeseen technological affordances. We argue that the feature of reconfigurability makes context of use the central issue in the assessment of the societal and moral impact of the technology. It follows that the design of good policies for new application contexts has to be central in a value sensitive design approach to reconfigurable technology.
Highlights
Information technology is widely used to fulfill societal goals such as safety and security
In this paper we present a first exploration of potential societal and moral issues of reconfigurable sensors developed for application in the safety and security domain, in the context of a large scale R&D-project in the Netherlands
The research presented in this paper is part of research project Sensor Technology Applied in Reconfigurable systems for Sustainable security: STARS
Summary
Information technology is widely used to fulfill societal goals such as safety and security These application areas put ever changing demands on the functionality of the technology. The application areas of safety and security have given a strong impulse to the development of sensor technology, because it provides efficient ways of monitoring various kinds of situations, both involving technological and human behavior. This impulse has been clearly visible, for example, in the post 9/11 aviation sector [with mixed results: Johnson (2006), King (2011)]. Reconfiguration of the sensors should make it possible to transform a sensor network installed in a harbor for security purposes, e.g. to prevent theft or sabotage, into an information system for rescue workers during a fire in the same harbor
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