Every major technical innovation requires society to respond to new ideas. Eleven years after the launch of the iPhone, we are still trying to understand how smartphones influence behavior.
When today's smart, connected products become autonomous, decentralized and intelligent, there are new considerations. Can robots witness a crime? Can a smart factory order supplies without human intervention? Will immutable records stand up in court?
At its best, engineering takes legal, ethical and moral parameters into consideration. How industry responds to these social meta-specifications will likely prove to be the biggest hurdle or the biggest asset in the development of the next generation of autonomous things.
I explain in detail in my new opinion column for Digital Engineering Magazine: http://www.digitaleng.news/de/the-new-decentralized-innovation-stack/