Eventuality of an Apartheid State of Things: An Ethical Perspective on the Internet of Things

Abstract

Notwithstanding the potential of IoT to revolutionise our personal and social lives, the absence of a solid framework of ethics may lead to situations where smart devices are used in ways uncongenial to the moral fabric of a society. In this work, the authors seek to provide a conceptual framework toward incorporating ethics in IoT. They employ the concept of object for each smart device in order to represent ethics relevant to its context. Moreover, the authors propose dedicating a separate ethics layer in the protocol stack of smart devices to account for socio-cultural ethical aspects of a society. The ethics layer enables us to account for ethical responsibilities of smart devices vis-a-vis society so that inadvertent physical, emotional or psychological harm to human beings is avoided. Such mechanism ensures that devices operate ethically not only at individual level but also at D2D level to give rise to high order ethical structures e.g. ethical home, ethical office, ethical university, ethical city, etc.