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The Internet of Things promises to offer numerous societal benefits by providing a spectrum of user applications. However, ethical ramifications of adopting such pervasive technology on a society-wide scale have not been adequately considered. Smart things endowed with artificial intelligence may carry out decisions that entail ethical consequences. It is assumed that the functioning of a smart device does not involve any ethical responsibility vis-a-vis its application context. Such a perspective may precipitate situations that endanger essential human values or cause physical or emotional harm. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the design of ethics within intelligent systems to safeguard human interests. In order to address these concerns, we propose a novel method based on Boolean algebra that enables a machine to exhibit varying ethical behaviour by employing the concept of ethics categories and ethics modes. Such enhancement of smart things offers a way to design ethically compliant smart devices and paves way for human friendly technology ecosystems.

A novel initiative in providing advanced civic amenities is the idea of smart city driven by the Internet of Things. Owing to a lack of consensus regarding what constitutes a smart city, diverse smart city architectures have been proposed. However, it is observed that adequate consideration is not given to the most important element of a smart city i.e. its people. In our opinion, energy efficient technologically driven city does not necessarily lead to a smart city. Ethics, tradition and law form essential ingredients of complex social palette that cannot be ignored. In this work we propose Ethics-Aware Object-Oriented Smart City Architecture (EOSCA) that has two distinguishing features. Firstly, we propose an object oriented layered architecture where an object represents an abstraction of a real world thing along with requisite security and ethics parameters. Secondly, we propose to integrate socio-cultural and ethical aspects within the smart city architecture by dedicating a separate ethics layer. Such enhancement not only addresses the challenge of privacy and security of a smart city, but also makes it people friendly by incorporating ethics. Such measures would facilitate social acceptance of smart city paradigm and augment its economic value.