Preserving Dignity, Maintaining Security and Acting Ethically

Abstract

Humans design, operate and are the net beneficiaries of most systems. However humans are fallible and make mistakes. At the same time humans are adaptable and resourceful in both designing systems and correcting them when they go wrong. In contrast machines have in the main been designed to follow rules and are often constrained to produce the same output for the same input over and over again. Ethical decisions require that different outputs arise from apparently identical appearing inputs as the wider context for the decision has changed. Humans make ethical decisions almost automatically but as we move towards an increasingly machine led society those aspects of dignity, ethics and security which are managed by humans will be addressed by machines. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the state of the art in security standardization in machine to machine and IoT systems, for the use cases of eHealth and autonomous transport systems, in order to outline the new ethics and security challenges of the machine led society. This will consider progress being made in standards towards the ideal of each of a Secure and Privacy Preserving Turing Machine and of an Ethical Turing Machine.