Perceptions of Autonomy: A Survey of User Opinions towards Autonomy in Intelligent Environments

In intelligent environment research, many believe that we should focus on developing end-user driven systems, seeking to empower the user, whereas, many others maintain that intelligent environments should be autonomous-agent driven, minimising user cognitive loading. We however, follow the premise that users of intelligent environments should be given a choice of how much autonomy they would like to keep and how much they wish to delegate to intelligent agents. This paper gives a brief overview of previous studies of user needs and concerns in intelligent environments, and reports on a recent online survey that was conducted to assess people's opinions of the use of autonomy in intelligent environments. We aim to raise awareness of the issues with using static (and extreme) levels of autonomy amongst researchers of intelligent environments and pervasive computing systems.