What societal values will 6G address?

As we now embark on 6G development it is important that outstanding societal challenges are considered, and that value creation is ensured. This White Paper outlines how a technology development driven from the perspective of societal values can complement the usual performance-driven perspective. A set of use case areas, representing new possibilities in 6G, are identified from published sources mainly from EU funded ICT-52 research projects. These use case areas are then analysed with respect to societal key values that can be impacted by future technology developments. This entails defining Key Value Indicators (KVIs) that can be used for monitoring and validating the impact on key societal values, and vice versa, for studying how societal Key Values can be enabled by impacting the technology development in certain directions.

We find that the studied use case areas can indeed be connected to societal key values that can be enabled by future 6G networks, and that it is possible to define KVIs to estimate this value impact. We propose a continued development of this analysis involving relevant subject matter experts and the application of this analysis on upcoming 6G research projects.