DEPARTMENT: IOT NEWS Carousel Kittens The Case for a Value-Based IoT The IEEE P7000 Working Group aims to establish a process model for addressing ethical concerns during system design. In this article, the group’s vice-chair critically reviews the IoT vision with regard to human values such as freedom, dignity, and privacy, and argues that we need to shape up requirements engineering to prevent a dystopian IoT future. In the early 1960s, two neuroscientists carried out one of the first investigations of what we call “embodied cognition” today. 1 Ten pairs of kittens were raised in the dark, except for three hours a day when each pair was placed in a carousel-type contraption that allowed one of them to move freely while the other was carried passively in a basket propelled by the first (see Figure 1). The kittens could not see each other, and the surrounding environment was set up in such a way that both received identical visual stimuli. The active kittens developed normally; the passive kittens not allowed to engage with the world developed serious shortcomings in intelligence and surviv- al ability, such as visually guided paw placement, avoidance of visual cliffs, responsiveness to objects, and so on. The IoT emerging now—with its automatic doors, virtual concierges, and self-driving cars— makes me feel a bit like that immobile kitten on the carousel, being carried along by technology without any agency of my own. While I appreciate having a safer and more efficient car, I also don’t want to lose the visceral thrill of driving. RETHINKING THE IOT VISION Human beings are highly complex biological systems with an embodied consciousness that develops intelligence through experience with the world. Technology is making that experience passive rather than active. I’m not sure if it was this distancing of humans from the world Marc Weiser was referring to when he wrote that “the [social] problem [associated with pervasive computing] while often couched in terms of privacy is really one of control.” 2 Is it only control I’m losing, or is it self-rule and hence freedom in general? In thinking about the IoT, we must consider the possibility of a technology paternalism 3 misused to nudge us into all kinds of behav- ior. Will smart assistants like Siri or Alexa soon tell us what to eat, who to date, what to buy, and how to spend our time, just as our cars tell us how to drive? Will AIs start to harvest IoT data to analyze our behavior on a massive scale? Sarah Spiekermann Vienna University of Economics and Business Department editor: Florian Michahelles; florian.michahelles@siemens .com