Engineering Digital Systems for Humanity: Challenges and Opportunities
Martina De Sanctis, Paola Inverardi, Patrizio Pelliccione
TL;DR
The paper investigates how to engineer digital systems that are safe, fair, and aligned with human values in the face of AI governance and societal impact. It surveys state-of-the-art in responsible computing, governance, and human-centered ecosystems, and motivates design through three interaction modes and two transversal concerns. It articulates four macro challenges—Continuous Systems Programming, Humans-Systems Interaction, Digital Systems impact on Humans, and Trust & Trustworthiness—along with concrete opportunities such as domain-specific languages, emotion-aware mediation, explainability, and adjustable autonomy, emphasizing post-production programming and ethics elicitation. The contribution is a structured human-centered engineering perspective intended to guide researchers and practitioners toward trustworthy, regulation-compliant, value-aware digital systems.
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.