Interview with Jean-Pierre Elloy

This week we met Jean-Pierre Elloy, General Delegate of the Central-Audencia-Ensa Alliance, which ensures the operational implementation of the alliance between these 3 schools. We asked this former university professor to help us in the writing of our ethical report.

Indeed, in this report we deal with the question of the consequences of connected homes on the individual and all the philosophical considerations implied. Jean-Pierre Elloy was able to provide us with some literary references such as John Stuart Mill, Aristotle or Emmanuel Kant. We have, therefore, introduced the philosophical concept of morality into our report, a concept etymologically identical to that of ethics which comes from the Latin ethicus meaning "moral", itself derived from the ancient Greek ἠθικός, êthikós. This morality is seen differently by each philosophers, but we can study all the points of view in order to translate the conclusions into our project. Ruben Augien distinguishes 3 levels of morality: minimalist, intermediate and maximalist. The maximalist level, for example, concerns the individual and only the individual. With reagrds to our project, it seems immoral from a maximalist point of view to share one’s personal data (medical or not) on a server where security is not fully assured. We came up with some solutions to respond to the ethical problems of the connected home, with, for example, the progressive introduction of these new technologies or the strong personalization of these services to adapt to every personality.

Big data and artificial intelligence were also topics discussed during this interview. In any case, we have come to the conclusion that any representation of the human being is partial and abstract. To date, there is no mathematical model that perfectly represents the human or the human spirit. But finally, isn’t it just reassuring that we cannot mathematize and predict the human being?

Regarding the progress of some of our deliverables: we created a drafting schedule this week for the final report. We have also been able to progress on the physical demonstrator by creating new sensors, such as a fall sensor, and continue to look for new sensors to integrate into our demonstrator.