Humane Autonomous Technology

This open access book takes a human-focused multidisciplinary look at the ways in which autonomous technology shapes experience, affecting human lives and ways of working in settings ranging from the arts, design, and service to maritime and industry. The book focuses on the humane, observing how technology can be designed and implemented in an ethical, human-centered way. Chapters in this book highlight factors that impinge on the humane and ethical, such as challenging questions of intellectual property rights, roles of humans, biases, and the uptake of other deviant human traits. Through delving into a range of dimensions and contexts from culture, the arts and design, to service, heavy industry and maritime, the contributors demonstrate that artificial intelligence and its related autonomous systems need to be understood holistically, as a system of systems, that should be working for the benefit of human present and future.

Rebekah Rousi is an Associate Professor (Tenure Track) at the School of Marketing and Communication, University of Vaasa, Finland. Rousi holds a PhD in Cognitive Science, specialising in user experience. Rousi is a performance artist. Her research interests are human-robot and human-artificial intelligence interaction, embodied experience, posthumanism, ethics, trust, and privacy.

Catharina von Koskull is an Associate Professor at the School of Marketing and Communication, University of Vaasa, Finland. Her research focuses on service marketing, management, service innovation, and Transformative Consumer Research related to wellbeing (i.e. agency, privacy, dignity) and ageing, digitalization, and care. Catharina is an experienced ethnographer and Art-based researcher in ethnodrama.

Virpi Roto is a Senior University Lecturer at the Department of Design, Aalto University, Finland. She spent 15 years at Nokia Research Center, in human-centred design and user experience. For 10 years she has served as Professor of Practice in Experience Design (Aalto University) and Aalto Designer Team Leader in projects on work automation with industry partners.