Watch the ethical wisdom of crowds in action and weep for the future of humanity.
Now that we have an "Internet of Things" and devices that make ethical decisions, the next step was bound to be weird. Designer Simone Rebaudengo has created a smart fan with a built-in ethical dilemma: it can only fan one person at a time. To decide who will benefit from its cooling powers, the fan outsources its problem to Mechanical Turk, and the crowd decides which person in the machine's range deserves fanning.
Rebaudengo's invention is an art project called "Ethical Things." Its inspiration came from battlefield robots and autonomous cars, both of which are loaded up with algorithms that help the machines make life-or-death decisions all the time. But what about the more mundane ethical decisions we have to make every day? That's where the fan comes in. "If a 'smart' coffee machine knows about its user's heart problems, should it accept giving him a coffee when he requests one?" asks Rebaudengo. His fan is a humorous way of imagining a future of ordinary connected devices that nevertheless face these kinds of moral dilemmas because they have so much access to data about the humans who own them.
Rebaudengo writes:
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