Dark scenarios

Abstract

In this chapter, we present four “dark scenarios” that highlight the key socio-economic, legal, technological and ethical risks to privacy, identity, trust, security and inclusiveness posed by new AmI technologies. We call them dark scenarios, because they show things that could go wrong in an AmI world, because they present visions of the future that we do not want to become reality. The scenarios expose threats and vulnerabilities as a way to inform policy-makers and planners about issues they need to take into account in developing new policies or updating existing legislation. Before presenting the four scenarios and our analysis of each, we describe the process of how we created the scenarios as well as the elements in our methodology for analysing the scenarios.