The Shaping of Ambient Intelligence and the Internet of Things

Opening the book as a scene setting chapter, this chapter provides a more detailed introduction. The major themes, issues, assumptions, and arguments associated with the topic covered in the book are introduced and further developed and elaborated on in subsequent chapters. It moreover includes an outline of the book’s scope, purpose, structure, and contents.

By analyzing and investigating AmI and the IoT as science-based technologies in the context of the European society, this book is positioned within the research and academic field of STS. With its two broad streams of scholarship consisting of (1) research on the nature and practices of S&T and (2) on the risks and other negative implications of S&T, STS is concerned with the study of the complex, dialectic interplay between scientific and technological developments and innovations and other dimensions of social life, treating S&T as cultural productions and historical events. In light of this, it involves distinctive assumptions, aims, methodological designs, analytical concepts, perspectives, and objectives. The intent of this short chapter is to provide insights into key underpinnings, methodological and analytical aspects, multi- and inter-disciplinary perspectives, and educational goals pertaining to the research and academic field of STS. This chapter is structured as follows. Section 2.1 covers key STS’s emphases, aims, and premises. Section 2.2 provides an account on the contribution of Michel Foucault and Thomas Kuhn to the field of STS. Section 2.3 elucidates STS’s methodological and analytical orientations. Section 2.4 introduces the multiple disciplinary perspectives associated with the research field of STS and the primary aim of espousing such perspectives. Section 2.5 gives a descriptive account on the interdisciplinary approach, focusing on the rationale behind its use in current research as well as characterizing aspects. This chapter ends, in Sect. 2.6, with a brief discussion on some educational facets and goals of STS.

This book is concerned with STS research, the study of science and technology in social context. Entailing techno-scientific issues relating to society, STS studies typically involve specific notions and themes based on the topic under investigation and take an interdisciplinary perspective on analyses whose approaches are drawn from a variety of disciplines and encompass a typical vocabulary featuring essential analytic concepts and/or academic discourses. This implies that STS studies differ as to underpinning thematic, conceptual, theoretical, analytical, and methodological tools they propose for exploring subject areas of science-based technologies in society. The aim of this chapter is to provide a conceptual background definition; to explain relevant concepts, theories, and current academic discourses; to outline the chosen research methodologies; and to present and describe the associated analytical techniques and strategies. I postulate that the value of the theoretical framework lies in fulfilling one primary purpose: to explain the nature, meaning, implications, and challenges associated with AmI and the IoT as socio-technological phenomena and as new emerging technologies resulting from an amalgamation of recent discoveries in human-directed sciences and computer science (and its subfield artificial intelligence). I moreover argue that while the analysis of socio-technical imaginaries as discourses may involve a situation where subjectivism may take various forms and formats, depending on the researcher, the nature of the object of inquiry, and the context in which these are embedded, there are still various pathways that can be pursued to produce a good quality interpretive work.

AmI depicts a vision of the future information society where humans will be surrounded and accompanied by advanced computer intelligence and technology, i.e. a vision of a next wave in ICT with far-reaching societal implications. Thus, it postulates a paradigmatic shift in computing and constitutes a large-scale societal discourse. As a form of S&T knowledge, AmI is a multidisciplinary field where a wide range of scientific and technological areas and human-directed sciences converge on a common vision of the future and the enormous opportunities such future will open up that are created by the incorporation of machine intelligence into people’s everyday lives. Topical studies on AmI usually focus on its technological dimension and the technology potential, predominantly, and also attempt to address some of its challenges and issues from a social, ethical, and economic perspective. However, there are important issues pertaining to the nature and practices of AmI that have been largely ignored, which can be positioned within the STS research field. The intent of this chapter is to analyze the ways in which AmI has emerged from a historical (a priori), epistemic, and material perspective, and why and how it has become socially anchored, institutionalized, and interwoven with politics and policymaking—cultural dissemination. Hence, AmI is analyzed as socio cultural and material practices that are shaped or engineered by the European society and represent a crucial basis for the construction of social and political reality within that society. I argue that AmI as construed and constructed sociotechnical imaginaries is not the product of an epistematic understanding and should not be conceived of as an ‘isolated island’ (e.g. apolitical-economic), nor should it be treated as something ahistorical, paradigmatic, and neutral. The results suggest that AmI as a hegemonic discourse (or part of the mainstream debate on the transformation of information society or as a techno-scientific development entailing concomitantly drastic shifts to the sociotechnical landscape of politics, the economy, institutions, and social norms and values engendered by political actions in the European society) is constructed in the light of historically-restricted, episteme-conditioned, and socio-culturally-specific conceptions about the social, political, institutional, legal, and techno-scientific changes that have taken place in the European information society in recent decades. To iterate, the outcome of the analysis applies to the IoT—by extension.

As they derive from scientific discovery or innovation, visions of the future of technology such as AmI and the IoT tend to be conceived of as paradigms and thus paradigm shifts in relation to various spheres of society, although they are concerned with people-centered approaches in the practice of technological development—that is, they are directed towards humans and targeted at complex, dynamic social realities. Moreover, as research subjects, they are positioned in a field of tension between social, political, and cultural practices and the performance aspects of technological systems. While such visions emanate from the transformational effects of computing, where concepts of paradigm and paradigm shift do actually hold, they still entail a lot of aspects of discursive nature in the sense of a set of concepts, ideas, claims, assumptions, and premises that are socio-culturally specific and historically contingent. The aim of this chapter is twofold: (1) to examine and classify multiple aspects of the paradigmatic dimension and key aspects of the discursive dimension of AmI and the IoT and related key issues, and (2) to investigate from a discursive analytical perspective knowledge/power relations, subject positioning, and legitimation pertaining to AmI and the IoT as discourses. I argue that there is a paradigm profile relating to (ubiquitous) computing, but there is no paradigm in society—nor should there be. In view of that, AmI and the IoT as computing paradigms are affected by knowledge/power relations in the sense of possessing the particularity of having a scientific-objective foundation, and I contend that this allows their promoters, creators, and producers to link AmI and the IoT with the scientific knowledge (and discourse), which is one of today’s main sources of legitimacy in European society in relation to knowledge-making, decision-making, and policy-making. As societal discourses, they are, as results suggest, constructed in correspondence with the subjects—favorably positioned within such discourses—that support them with regard to their institutional belonging, scholarly affiliation, social location, cultural inclination, ideological commitment, and/or socio-political status. This involves biases in the strategic actions of these subjects as well as their mode of calculation about their ‘objective ideal and material interests’. Also, the legitimation of their actions—and hence their interests—occur on the basis of normative orientations and values.

Materialized as a result of science-based technologies and innovations, visions of a next wave in ICT such as AmI and the IoT are aimed at creating smart environments, such as smart buildings, smart energy, smart transport, smart industries, smart cities, smart healthcare, smart mobility, smart living, and so on. This implies that AmI and the IoT technologies will be able to recognize different contexts (e.g. locations, physical conditions, events, situations, social environments, people’s states, etc.) and to react and pre-act autonomously, adaptively or proactively, without human intervention. This new technological feature is seen to hold great potential to advance environmental sustainability and improve societal sustainability. In other words, given their ubiquity presence, AmI and the IoT are increasingly seen as a promising response sustainable development challenges due to their potential to enable substantial energy savings and GHG emissions reductions in most economic and urban sectors, and to address societal challenges in area of social inclusion, social justice, and healthcare. However, AmI and the IoT have a number of potential risks, uncertainties, and concerns in relation to sustainable development that need to be understood when placing high expectations on and marshalling resources for such technologies by visionaries and research leaders. With the growing concern about their multiple environmental effects and social ramifications, AmI and the IoT visions are worth attention and further research. This chapter aims to investigate the risks that AmI and the IoT as forms of, and advances in, S&T pose to environmental and societal sustainability, and to address the eco-environmental aspects of technology in relation to ecological modernization and transition governance. I argue that there are intricate relationships and tradeoffs among the positive impacts, negative effects, and unintended consequences for both the environment and the society, flowing mostly from the development, use and disposal of AmI and the IoT technologies throughout the information society, and pertaining to the digital divide, technological and socio-demographic gaps, inherent in the design of new technologies, respectively. The intention of this attempt is to offer people of modern, high-tech societies the relevant resources with which to evaluate—analytically, environmentally, and ethically—the gains and the risks, the safeties and the perils, of AmI and the IoT as notable advances of in S&T.

AmI and the IoT are among the metaphors that are used to depict visions of a future filled with smart, interacting, and interconnected everyday objects and a whole range of immense opportunities and fascinating possibilities such future will open up and bring that are created by the incorporation of ICT intelligence into people’s everyday lives. The vision of AmI entails integrating tiny microelectronic information processors and networks of miniature sensors and actuators into everyday objects so to make them smart, and the vision of the IoT involves interconnecting uniquely identified embedded devices and physical, virtual, and smart objects within the existing Internet infrastructure. Sharing many technological features, these two visions of computationally augmented everyday environments have claims to be aware of people’s presence and situational context, adaptive and anticipatory to their desires and intentions, and personalized to their needs. However, while many technologists and scientists paint the promises of AmI and the IoT in sunny colors, touting them as a step towards a better world, social observers and scholars have doubts about the potentials of this technological evolution. The ramifications of such extensive integration of ICT intelligence into people’s everyday lives are difficult to predict. With the open challenges and the growing concerns pertaining to their deployment, AmI and the IoT are visions that are worth attention and further research. This chapter aims to investigate the risks that AmI and the IoT pose to ethical values, and to provide some prospective technological safeguards. The intention of this endeavor is to better understand how far such visions should influence people’s everyday lives and to contribute to, by identifying and addressing the great challenges involved, steering this development in a direction that goes some distance towards mitigating the risks posed by the emerging worlds of AmI and the IoT so to help foster users’ trust and confidence in the technological vision of the twenty-first century, and thus create and revive optimism among technology users as to how this vision will unfold.

AmI and the IoT are said to hold great potential and promise in terms of radical social transformations. By virtue of their very definition, implying a certain desired view on the world, they represent more visions of the future than realities. And as shown by and known from preceding techno-visions and forecasting studies, the future reality is most likely to end up being very different from the way it is initially envisioned. Indeed, techno-visions appear to face a paradox, in that they fail to balance between innovative and futuristic claims and realistic assumptions. This pertains to unreasonable prospects, of limited modern applicability, on how people, technology, and society will evolve, as well as to a generalization or oversimplification of the rather specific or complex challenges involved in enabling future scenarios or making them for real. Also, crucially, techno-utopia is a relevant risk in such a strong focus on ambitious and inspiring visions of the future of technology. Techno-utopian discourses surround the advent of new technological innovations or breakthroughs, on the basis of which these discourses promise revolutionary social changes. The central issue with techno-visions is the technologically deterministic view underlying many of the envisioned scenarios, ignoring or falling short in considering the user and social dynamics involved in the innovation process. This has implications for the acceptance of technological innovation opportunities. This chapter aims to explore the power and seminal role of social innovation and participative and humanistic design—as one holistic approach—in sustaining the success of AmI and the IoT technologies, and to identify and address the great challenges involved in the process of embracing this approach. As increasingly a condition for technology development, democratization is seen as participation on a macro level. I argue that the continuity of AmI and the IoT will be based on the social dimension of innovation and, thus, the participative and humanistic dimension of design—i.e. the ability and willingness of people to use, absorb, or acclimatize to technological opportunities as well as their active involvement in the design process, coupled with the consideration for human values in the fundamental design choices. The primary intention is to provide insights and conduits to avoid technological determinism and unrealism associated with the AmI and the IoT visions and to highlight the tremendous value of the emerging approaches into and trends around technology design and innovation in addressing the complexity of AmI and the IoT contexts, enhancing related applications development, and managing the unpredictable future as to emerging user behaviors and needs in the contexts of AmI and the IoT.