From Smart to Autonomous (Cities, Homes, and Everything) : Opportunities and Challenges

In the near future, multitudes of autonomous decision making agents will pervade our everyday environments, to decide on our behalf the best way to increase our personal comfort, health, and security, or improve the efficiency, resilience and sustainability of our cities and their infrastructures. This will relieve us from the such duties and from the worry of thinking about them. Yet, “with great power comes great responsibility”, and the goal of the talk is to reason about the challenges implied by assigning great (and often critical) decision power to pervasive autonomous systems. This includes technical challenges, to make sure to engineer autonomous systems capable of properly meeting our needs, of dynamically evolving to adapt to ever changing situations, and of dynamically learning how to interact with each other. But it also includes ethical, legal, and political challenges, to make sure such systems will be able to act and govern in accord to our guidance and in respect of our social norms.