Abstract
As technology advances, systems involving artificial components provide more and more support for people. The potential consequences of this phenomena are examined in the specific circumstances of ‘ambient assisted living’ as an instantiation of the concept of ‘intelligent environment’. This chapter describes the idea of ‘ambient assisted living’ and looks at some of the possible ways humans may be affected by the prevalence of technology. The general example of assisted healthcare, and the specific example of medication support are used to show that systems are advancing. Moreover, these advancements can lead to problems with both the artificial systems, and the larger systems with which they are involved. In many cases there is a trade-off around having people in the loop, but inevitably they will need to be included for many decision making processes. Keeping a person in the loop might also partially redress problems of Artificial General Intelligence systems. The chapter concludes with reflections on how these considerations can help us to retain the positive aspects whilst avoiding the negative side effects of the hypothetical technological singularity.
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Thus, it can be said that the term AAL has a European context; it is hardly found in research programs outside Europe, but this is only an issue of terminology.
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Acknowledgements
This research has been partially supported by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Goverment through the project TIN2011-28335-C02-02. This work also formed part of WIDTH project that was funded by EU FP7 under Marie Curie scheme (2011–2014).
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Huyck, C., Augusto, J., Gao, X., Botía, J.A. (2015). Advancing Ambient Assisted Living with Caution. In: Helfert, M., Holzinger, A., Ziefle, M., Fred, A., O'Donoghue, J., Röcker, C. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health. ICT4AWE 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 578. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27695-3_2
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