Intelligent Cities and Some Ethical Challenges to the Mechanized Human Relations

Making current cities intelligent, future technologies will change human life. Intelligent cities will lay the foundations for life’s quality improvement, public health promotion, and prevention of some problems. In spite of their positive effects, intelligent cities pose moral problems for which we have to think now. One of them is that human relations will be mechanized. Adopting an analytical method, this study seeks to consider that this kind of mechanization will lead to some other ethical problems: compassion and altruism will be decreased, people will take much less moral lessons, they will lose their abilities in decision making, and moral exemplars will not play a substantial role anymore. Considering Islamic ethics’ teachings, the present study suggests some solutions such as increasing media knowledge, strengthening and preserving human dignity, and increasing interpersonal communication and so forth.