**5.2 Criticism**

It is said that any immersive, personalized, context-aware and anticipatory characteristics bring up concerns about the loss of privacy. At the same time, it is claimed that applications of ambient intelligence do not necessarily have to reduce privacy in order to work! In social sciences, the possibility of flaws is a question of probability. Nuclear accidents and related catastrophes offer a realistic analogy. According to safety calculations, nuclear disasters would never happen, because the computed probabilities are neglectable. They still happen! Intrusion is an everyday

#### *IoT Applications Computing*

phenomenon, and it is difficult to imagine that hacking would decrease when information systems expand and get more complicated and difficult to guard.

Power concentration in large organizations, a fragmented, decreasingly private society and hyperreal environments where the virtual is indistinguishable from the real, are said to be the main topics of critics. But what about the sector as a main factor in the general tendency of concentrating wealth and power? What about the major global technology companies, accountable only to themselves? Should not that be addressed as well?

#### **5.3 The Santa Claus' list**

According to the Information Society and Technology Advisory Group (ISTAG), the following characteristics will permit the societal acceptance of ambient intelligence: Ambient intelligence should facilitate human contact, be oriented towards community and cultural enhancement, help to build knowledge and skills for work, better quality of work, citizenship and consumer choice, inspire trust and confidence, be consistent with long term sustainability—personal, societal and environmental—and with lifelong learning, be made easy to live with and controllable by ordinary people [35].

Consider the global social media platforms of today, applying the principle of unilateral control. Now, literally billions of people produce information about themselves, free of charge, to be sold by gigantic operators to other corporations and public authorities. It is surveillance of a magnitude that used to be unimaginable. Here, the essence of artificial intelligence is exposed. It may provide benefits and joy for the billions while enriching global corporations, tightening the straitjackets of ordinary citizens and providing the database for individualized control as well as manipulation of consumer choices and political commodities [36]. The Santa Claus' list appears equally important and naïve.

#### **6. Conclusions**

It is easy to laugh at Dr. Pangloss' assertion that our noses are shaped to carry spectacles, therefor we use spectacles. But concurrent designers of spectacles may actually think like the doctor, and so may programmers as well. Designers and programmers are professionals, and the rationale of professions is that they reserve for themselves the right to judge what is accountable knowledge. In their practice, evidence-based knowledge and professional judgement are not necessarily kept apart. Drawing up a list of all the good things ambient intelligence should promote resembles Dr. Pangloss' explanation why his friend drowned in the bay of Lisbon: The bay was created for that purpose!

An obvious parallel is the tenet of business that economic growth must be pursued for the sake of economic growth, because in the best of worlds there is perpetual economic growth. Technological development is of course a constitutive part of that narrative. That part also includes the (professional) presumption that ethical guidelines are a matter for the sector itself. MIT professor, Dr. Tegmark has pointed out the urgent need for ethical guidelines, elaborated by the sector itself [37]. Kindly expressed, he cannot be familiar with avalanches of financial disasters, instigated by the financial sector for some centuries now, under the auspices of self-regulation.

The fundamental dilemma is not whether to promote ambient intelligence or not. It will be developed anyway. But how to work out ethical rules that would safeguard users from intrusion, fraud, blackmailing, trafficking, abduction of identity,

#### *A Panglossian Dilemma DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95944*

robbery, or commercial, social and political manipulation, or global surveillance of each and every individual – all the horrors of Pandora's box?

As far as ethical rules are concerned, the problem is not only related to artificial intelligence, but to the very essence of modern society. We are living in a world in constant flux, where uncertainty is said to be increasingly replaced by rational decision making, backed by science and new technology. In the best of worlds, that process would eventually make individual judgement and moral choices obsolete. However, we are not quite there yet, and the outspoken idea of modern societies is not to be judgmental. The contradiction between ideology and reality indicates a vast grey zone, where Pandora's box is wide open. Voltaire and Dr. Pangloss may have died, but the Panglossian dilemma lives!
