How to Humanize Technology in Smart Cities

1. Introduction

We are living in an era where most of our daily decisions are led by technology and digitization which are ubiquitous in our society. It penetrates every aspect of our lives: the technology is used in medical operations and treatments; we use it as a social media to build connections among people; big data techniques collect information about us and our emotion recognition; and it tries to use our daily language and transfer it into robots, machines and artificial intelligence to replace human beings in various daily activities.

The growing use of information and communication technology (ICT) means that people's connectivity both within themselves and between outside institutions is done in many cases through augmented and virtual reality that use digital platforms. In other words, technology platforms are changing paradigms around us and new concepts challenge our society, culture and behavior. Big volumes of our daily lives activities are done in the digitization way such as consumption, shopping, banking transaction, contacting people, friends and family (Barby, 2012; Peppet, 2014; Royakkers et.al., 2018). On the other side, these technological developments raise big issues of morals, ethics and regulations. Due to the short space of the paper we cannot widen the discussion on these issues.