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IoT is expected to have far-reaching consequences on society due to a wide spectrum of applications like smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart agriculture, smart home, etc. However, ethical considerations of AI-enabled smart devices have not been duly considered from a design perspective. In this paper, the authors propose a novel fuzzy logic-based method to incorporate ethics within smart things of IoT. Ethical considerations relevant to a machine context are represented in terms of fuzzy ethics variables (FEVs) and ethics rules. For each ethics rule, a value called scaled ethics value (SEV) is used to indicate its ethical desirability. In order to model flexibility in ethical response, the authors employ the concept of ethics modes that selectively allow scenarios depending on the value of SEV. The method offers a viable mechanism for smart devices to imbue ethical sensitivity that can pave the way for a technology society amenable to human ethics. However, the method does not account for varying ethics, as such incorporating learning mechanisms represent a promising research direction.

Notwithstanding the potential of IoT to revolutionise our personal and social lives, the absence of a solid framework of ethics may lead to situations where smart devices are used in ways uncongenial to the moral fabric of a society. In this work, the authors seek to provide a conceptual framework toward incorporating ethics in IoT. They employ the concept of object for each smart device in order to represent ethics relevant to its context. Moreover, the authors propose dedicating a separate ethics layer in the protocol stack of smart devices to account for socio-cultural ethical aspects of a society. The ethics layer enables us to account for ethical responsibilities of smart devices vis-a-vis society so that inadvertent physical, emotional or psychological harm to human beings is avoided. Such mechanism ensures that devices operate ethically not only at individual level but also at D2D level to give rise to high order ethical structures e.g. ethical home, ethical office, ethical university, ethical city, etc.

Notwithstanding the potential of IoT to revolutionise our personal and social lives, the absence of a solid framework of ethics may lead to situations where smart devices are used in ways uncongenial to the moral fabric of a society. In this work, the authors seek to provide a conceptual framework toward incorporating ethics in IoT. They employ the concept of object for each smart device in order to represent ethics relevant to its context. Moreover, the authors propose dedicating a separate ethics layer in the protocol stack of smart devices to account for socio-cultural ethical aspects of a society. The ethics layer enables us to account for ethical responsibilities of smart devices vis-a-vis society so that inadvertent physical, emotional or psychological harm to human beings is avoided. Such mechanism ensures that devices operate ethically not only at individual level but also at D2D level to give rise to high order ethical structures e.g. ethical home, ethical office, ethical university, ethical city, etc.