Engineering Digital Systems for Humanity: Challenges and Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper discusses the societal challenges and opportunities in engineering digital systems that prioritize human values, focusing on human roles, trust, and legal compliance to ensure sustainable and ethical technology deployment.

Contribution

It identifies key human-centric challenges in digital system engineering, emphasizing proactive, reactive, and passive human roles, along with trust and legal considerations.

Findings

Highlights the importance of human roles in digital interactions

Identifies trust and legislation as critical challenges

Proposes a human-centered perspective for system engineering

Abstract

As testified by new regulations like the European AI act, the worries about the societal impact of (autonomous) software technologies are becoming of public concern. Social and human values, besides the traditional software behaviour and quality, are increasingly recognized as important for sustainability and long-term well-being. In this paper, we identify the macro and technological challenges and opportunities of present and future digital systems that should be engineered for humanity. Our specific perspective in identifying the challenges is to focus on humans and on their role in their co-existence with digital systems. The first challenge considers humans in a proactive role when interacting with the digital systems, i.e., taking initiative in making things happening instead of reacting to events. The second concerns humans having an active role in the interaction with the digital systems i.e., on humans that interact with digital systems as a reaction to events. The third challenge focuses on humans that have a passive role i.e., they experience, enjoy or even suffer the decisions and/or actions of digital systems. Two further transversal challenges are considered: the duality of trust and trustworthiness and the compliance to legislation that both may seriously affect the deployment and use of digital systems.