Privacy is a huge concern these days and it will be a major topic at the 4th EUCogIII Members Conference on the “Social and Ethical Aspects of Cognitive Systems”.
As sensing technologies progress and we find new ways of analyzing the digital records of human behavior, the boundaries of privacy are constantly challenged. As EUCog member Joanna Bryson puts it, “… we need governance/legislature to protect us since AI & social media aren’t going away”.
The EPSRC Principles of Robotics raised the privacy issue of robot companions already three years ago. Alan Winfield, member of EUCog and speaker at the Brighton Event, explains it in this blog post: privacy and hacking are included already in the second and third principles.
Illah Nourbakhsh’s devotes the first chapter of his book Robot Futures to analyze how “robotic technologies are enabling massive information gathering and control to pervade the real world”. With robots like this, Big Data is not only about web analytics anymore, it invades the real world through cognitive technologies. Mobile phone tracking is just a first step in that direction.
Ryan Calo’s chapter “Robots and Privacy” on the book “Robotethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics” has a direct message:
“Robots are, first and foremost, a human instrument. And after industrial manufacturing, the principle use to which we’ve put that instrument has been surveillance.”
It also opens the discussion to the social meaning of robot companions and the threat of hacking.
These are some ideas that might fuel the discussion at the Brighton Event. There might be a lot of wrong things to worry about cognitive systems. Privacy is certainly not one of them.
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