Re-Thinking Smartness : Designing More Ethical Connected Devices for the Home

现代智能设备能够实现令人难以置信的事情：让生活更轻松，更愉快，更安全。但这种“智能”往往是以设备从家中收集数据为代价的，限制了我们使用它们的方式，改变了我们相互联系的方式。这篇论文探讨了智能设备意味着什么，智能引起的伦理问题，以及我们可能重新思考智能以更好地支持人们的需求和价值观的方式。它使用四个镜头来做到这一点：聪明、隐私、社会参与者和尊重。为了更好地理解这个问题，我们开始通过调查和访谈的结果来调查什么是聪明，以及它如何在各种环境中表现出来。在此过程中，我们确定了随之而来的伦理问题，如隐私和自主权，并讨论了它们在设备上如何操作的相似性和差异。然后，我们通过更详细地解决所确定的两个问题来跟进。我们展示了为期六周的技术探测部署的结果，该部署旨在通过可视化和限制数据流来让人们控制他们的连接设备。我们展示了参与者的偏好如何在研究过程中发生变化，以及当获得正确的资源时，人们如何学习并团结起来解决家庭中的隐私问题。其次，我们探讨了围绕语音界面的社会问题，并进行了一项调查，探讨了信任、拟人化和与语音助手的关系发展之间的相关性。我们展示了人们如何以类似于人与人之间的方式发展与社交设备的关系，提出了关于社交互动模式被用来操纵的潜力的问题。然后，本文提出了尊重的概念，作为一个透镜，使用人际互动的标准，以评估与智能设备的互动，把这些调查线在一起。来自不同学科的尊重行为的实践和理论观点被用来将智能系统的行为与以前的道德理论，代理，社会等级和压迫的工作联系起来。在这四个镜头的基础上，论文最后讨论了重新思考聪明的潜在方法，在减轻问题的同时收获它的好处。从完全拒绝智能，让人们更好地控制他们的设备，使设备更尊重，并使用不同的概念模型的设备，论文奠定了基础，更社会意识的系统，利用他们的智能，以支持用户在管理和享受生活的连接家庭。这项研究属于EPSRC网络安全研究主题

Modern smart devices are capable of incredible things: making life easier, more enjoyable, and more secure. But this 'smartness' often comes at the cost of devices harvesting data from the home, constraining how we use them, and changing the ways we relate to each other. This thesis explores what it means for a device to be smart, the ethical concerns that smartness causes, and ways that we might re-think smartness to better support people's needs and values. It does so using four lenses of smartness, privacy, social actors, and respect. In order to better understand the problem, we begin by presenting the results of surveys and interviews investigating perceptions of what smartness is, and how it manifests across a variety of contexts. In doing so we identify concomitant ethical concerns, such as privacy and autonomy, and discuss the similarities and differences in how they operate across devices. We then follow up by addressing two of the identified problems in greater detail. We present the results of a six-week technology probe deployment designed to give people control over their connected devices by visualising and constraining their data flows. We show how participants preferences shifted over the course of the study and how, when given the right resources, people can learn and come together to solve privacy problems in the home. Secondly, we explore social concerns around voice interfaces, with a survey exploring correlations between trust, anthropomorphism, and relationship development with voice assistants. We show how people develop relationships with social devices in a similar manner to those between people, raising questions about the potential for social interaction modalities to be used to manipulate. The thesis then brings these lines of enquiry together by proposing the concept of respect as a lens for using standards of interpersonal interaction to evaluate interactions with smart devices. Practical and theoretical perspectives on respectful behaviour from a variety of disciplines are used to link the behaviours of intelligent systems to previous work on moral theory, agency, social hierarchies, and oppression. Drawing on each of these four lenses, the thesis closes by discussing potential ways to re-think smartness, reaping its benefits whilst mitigating its problems. From rejecting smartness altogether, giving people greater control over their devices, making devices more respectful, and using different conceptual models of devices, the thesis lays the foundations for more socially aware systems that use their smartness to support users in managing and enjoying life in the connected home.This research comes under the EPSRC Cyber Security research theme