Re-thinking smartness: designing more ethical connected devices for the home

Thesis

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.

Authors: Seymour, W

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Voice Assistants; Respect; HCI; Smart homes