Page 51 - ITU Kaleidoscope 2016

ICTs for a Sustainable World

Singapore Taxis, and Airplane taxis as reported recently in Robotics & Automation Society, Universities and R&D
media, to name a few. The positive impact of these Labs, to assess impact on society, impact on work culture in
innovations such as intelligent vehicles can be enormous. the upcoming era with human - robots interaction, whether
Consider the potential ecological savings of using highways it would be helpful or hateful, collaborative or competitive,
so much more efficiently and from the safety aspect reduce or simply aligned with humans. The recent edition (April
the injuries and deaths in road accidents. Elderly and 2016) of “ITU News” deliberates about: Do ICTs deserve
disabled people would be able to travel around in such cars our trust? Technologies are becoming more autonomous in
on their own. People could dispatch their cars to the their interaction and decision-making, but how does one
automated parking warehouse autonomously instead of trust in future ICTs? ITU-T has published a new technical
using surface land for parking and then recall them later. report for experts in the field. The impact on society is vast
Truly, gains in this area are enormous and most and wide-ranging. Tesla’s autopilot [10] highlighted the
encouraging. The stuff of science fiction is rapidly need to address important issues regarding an autonomous
becoming a fact of life. But this presupposes robust, reliable automotive future, including regulatory challenges, human
and secure networks, devices, and systems, in which override capabilities; and the pursuit of safer driving.
individuals and society can repose complete trust.
China is leading the global M2M technologies – an
By most indications and practical product developments essential component for IoT – thanks to a huge smart phone
and integrated systems, AI is now mature, both as a science subscriber base and the country’s ambitious and wide-
and as an engineering discipline. Many opportunities exist ranging M2M plans, says a new E&Y report. A GSMA
for AI to have a positive impact on our planet's report [11] predicts that the country would reach 1 billion
environment. AI researchers and development engineers M2M connections by 2020. Obviously, therefore, it calls
have a unique perspective, tools and the skills required to for urgency in addressing the challenges. Another IEEE
contribute practically to address concerns of global report [12] on the subject also raises the question of trusting
warming, poverty, food production, arms control, the robots.
healthcare including care of the elderly, education, and
demographic issues. According to this report, ever more autonomous machines
will present challenges spanning technical, regulatory, legal
and even philosophical realms. They will force us to
How would real-time monitoring of emotions impact IoT? confront deep moral quandaries, and might even tweak our
At the moment, emotional response is being tested by sense of what it means to be human. It has been seen that
advertising agencies, but the applications don’t stop there technology precedes before the laws to deal with its
[7], according to the information in the referred ITU News. consequences are in place. Self-driving cars are ready
Reasoning ability in robots, feeling of pleasure and pain has before the laws are. Robots are performing surgeries with
been reported to be possible in the vast literature published dexterity and precision – should they be allowed to take
on the subject. Unveiled in June 2014, Pepper, a robot that over the operation theatre? How much trust can one put in
is capable of expressing and responding to emotions is care giver robots? Should robots be only used for hazardous
a humanoid robot jointly developed by Aldebaran jobs like mining, working in nuclear facilities, chemical
Robotics of France and SoftBank of Japan [8]. It has the plants, etc., or used as warriors or autonomous weapons to
ability to read emotions and. the ability to analyze decide who lives or dies? Could robots be taught human
expressions and voice tones. It is much more than a robot, values and morals and imparted the sense to discern what is
designed to be a genuine humanoid companion created to physically and morally right and what is absolutely wrong.
communicate and respond in the These, among others are critical issues that need to be
most natural and intuitive way, through its body movements urgently addressed.
and voice. Pepper keeps on learning about the tastes, habits
so as to personalize to the human companion, gradually Wang in his classical paper on Cognitive Informatics [13],
memorizing the personality traits, preferences, and adapts an emerging discipline that studies the internal information
itself. Pepper has been designed to identify human processing mechanisms of the brain and their engineering
emotions and to select the behaviour best suited to the applications, via an inter disciplinary approach states how,
situation. While the technology behind these advances are human beings acquire, process, interpret, and express
astounding and even cause delight, the potential negative information by using the brain, and how minds of different
ramifications are to be considered. For instance, can fraud individuals are understood that is, in a way, relevant to the
be committed by creating a humanoid robot to impersonate design of super intelligence machines. In his recent paper
someone? Samani in his book on cognitive robotics [9] [14], Wang expands the methodology and soft computing to
highlighted the need for aligning humanoid robots cover philosophical, mathematical, and theoretical
mimicking human behavior with human interest. foundations for cognitive robotics and eBrain.

3. TRUST IN THE EMERGING SCENARIO This paper does not dwell on the technology aspects of the
control structure, cognitive informatics, soft computing, and
The subject of Trust has caught the attention of several so on, which are being dealt with in depth by experts in the
scientists, professional institutions, e.g., IEEE, IEEE scientific community and academia, and confines the scope

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