Scenarios for Ambient Intelligence in 2010 Final Report

Preface The IST Advisory Group (ISTAG) has made consistent efforts to get a higher level of focus and a higher pace of development in Europe on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). To give these efforts a longer-term perspective a scenario planning exercise was launched during 2000. The scenarios were developed by the IPTS (part of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre) in collaboration with DG Information Society and with the active involvement of 35 experts from across Europe. The aim was to describe what living with 'Ambient Intelligence' might be like for ordinary people in 2010. The concept of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) provides a vision of the Information Society where the emphasis is on greater user-friendliness, more efficient services support, user-empowerment, and support for human interactions. People are surrounded by intelligent intuitive interfaces that are embedded in all kinds of objects and an environment that is capable of recognising and responding to the presence of different individuals in a seamless, unobtrusive and often invisible way. Scenarios are not traditional extrapolations from the present, but offer provocative glimpses of futures that can (but need not) be realised. Each scenario has a script that is used to work out the key developments in technologies, society, economy, and markets necessary to arrive at the scenario. With the timescale of significant changes in the ICT industry now shorter than one year, scenario planning provides one of the few structured ways to get an impression of the future. The central feature of the scenarios is that people (as people not just 'users', 'consumers' or 'employees') are at the forefront of the Information Society. This vision of people benefiting from services and applications whilst supported by new technologies in the background and intelligent user interfaces was essential to the ISTAG notion of Ambient Intelligence in the first place. The four scenarios underscore the ISTAG view. They contrast applications that serve to optimise efficiency (whether in business or in society) against those that emphasise human relationships, sociability or just having 'fun'. They also underline the place of Ambient Intelligence in serving society and the community as well as individuals. Clearly, more scenarios could be conceived. For example, Ambient Intelligence has a host of important applications in industry, in the workplace and in machine to machine interactions that are not fully considered here. But the specific scenarios should not be read as end-objectives in themselves. They are rather …