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Artificial agents and their moral natureIn Peter Kroes (ed.), The moral status of technical artefacts. 2014.Artificial agents, particularly but not only those in the infosphere Floridi (Information – A very short introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010a), extend the class of entities that can be involved in moral situations, for they can be correctly interpreted as entities that can perform actions with good or evil impact (moral agents). In this chapter, I clarify the concepts of agent and of artificial agent and then distinguish between issues concerning their moral behaviour vs. issues …Read more
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130We increasingly rely on AI-related applications (smart technologies) to perform tasks that would be simply impossible by un-aided or un-augmented human intelligence. This is possible because the world is becoming an infosphere increasingly well adapted to AI’s limited capacities. Being able to imagine what adaptive demands this process will place on humanity may help to devise technological solutions that can lower their anthropological costs.
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508Information ethics: on the philosophical foundation of computer ethicsIn John Weckert (ed.), Computer Ethics, Routledge. 2007.The essential difficulty about Computer Ethics’ (CE) philosophical status is a methodological problem: standard ethical theories cannot easily be adapted to deal with CE-problems, which appear to strain their conceptual resources, and CE requires a conceptual foundation as an ethical theory. Information Ethics (IE), the philosophical foundational counterpart of CE, can be seen as a particular case of ‘environmental’ ethics or ethics of the infosphere. What is good for an information entity and t…Read more
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14La quarta rivoluzione: come l'infosfera sta trasformando il mondoRaffaello Cortina. 2017.Chi siamo e che tipo di relazioni stabiliamo gli uni con gli altri? Luciano Floridi sostiene che gli sviluppi nel campo delle tecnologie dell’informazione e della comunicazione stiano modificando le risposte a domande così fondamentali. I confini tra la vita online e quella offline tendono a sparire e siamo ormai connessi gli uni con gli altri senza soluzione di continuità, diventando progressivamente parte integrante di un’“infosfera” globale. Questo passaggio epocale rappresenta niente meno ch…Read more
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194Information and design: book symposium on Luciano Floridi’s The Logic of InformationJournal of Documentation 76 (2). 2020.The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS)
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185Ethical medical data donation: a pressing issueIn Peter Dabrock, Matthias Braun & Patrik Hummel (eds.), The Ethics of Medical Data Donation, Springer Verlag. 2019.
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Il diavolo e la pietra: l'analisi del realismo in Michael DummettIn Piergiorgio Donatelli, Luciano Floridi & Società Italiana di Filosofia Analitica (eds.), Filosofia Analitica 1993 Bilanci E Prospettive, Lithos. 1993.
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455It has been suggested that to overcome the challenges facing the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) of an ageing population and reduced available funding, the NHS should be transformed into a more informationally mature and heterogeneous organisation, reliant on data-based and algorithmically-driven interactions between human, artificial, and hybrid (semi-artificial) agents. This transformation process would offer significant benefit to patients, clinicians, and the overall system, but it would …Read more
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214Logical fallacies as informational shortcutsSynthese 167 (2): 317-325. 2009.The paper argues that the two best known formal logical fallacies, namely denying the antecedent (DA) and affirming the consequent (AC) are not just basic and simple errors, which prove human irrationality, but rather informational shortcuts, which may provide a quick and dirty way of extracting useful information from the environment. DA and AC are shown to be degraded versions of Bayes’ theorem, once this is stripped of some of its probabilities. The less the probabilities count, the closer th…Read more
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448On 8th August 2019, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, announced the creation of a £250 million NHS AI Lab. This significant investment is justified on the belief that transforming the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) into a more informationally mature and heterogeneous organisation, reliant on data-based and algorithmically-driven interactions, will offer significant benefit to patients, clinicians, and the overall system. These opportunities are realistic and should…Read more
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8Pensare l'infosfera: La filosofia come design concettualeRaffaello Cortina. 2020.Pensare l’infosfera: La filosofia come design concettuale di Luciano Floridi è la traduzione, rivista e parziale, di un libro pubblicato in inglese sulla logica dell’informazione (The Logic of Information, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2019). All’interno della riflessione sul digitale che il filosofo italiano sta conducendo ormai da qualche decennio, questo saggio si colloca come terza parte di una tetralogia legata alla filosofia dell’informazione. I primi due volumi, The Philosophy of Inform…Read more
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211Online information of vaccines: information quality, not only privacy, is an ethical responsibility of search enginesFrontiers in Medicine 7. 2021.The fact that Internet companies may record our personal data and track our online behavior for commercial or political purpose has emphasized aspects related to online privacy. This has also led to the development of search engines that promise no tracking and privacy. Search engines also have a major role in spreading low-quality health information such as that of anti-vaccine websites. This study investigates the relationship between search engines’ approach to privacy and the scientific qual…Read more
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4301The ethical debate about the gig economy: a review and critical analysisTechnology in Society 65 (2): 101954. 2021.The gig economy is a phenomenon that is rapidly expanding, redefining the nature of work and contributing to a significant change in how contemporary economies are organised. Its expansion is not unproblematic. This article provides a clear and systematic analysis of the main ethical challenges caused by the gig economy. Following a brief overview of the gig economy, its scope and scale, we map the key ethical problems that it gives rise to, as they are discussed in the relevant literature. We m…Read more
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84Storia e multimedia. Atti del Settimo Congresso Internazionale/ Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress Association for History & Computing, Bologna 1992 (review)History and Computing 7 110-114. 1995.Review of F. Bocchi and P. Denley (eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of the Association for History & Computing.
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613Brave. Net. World: the Internet as a disinformation superhighway?The Electronic Library 14 509-514. 1996.This article is a modified version of a paper I gave to the conference Philosophy & Informatics - First Italian Conference on the use of ICT in philosophical disciplines, promoted by the Italian Philosophical Association (University of Rome "La Sapienza", 23-24 November, 1995).
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150Richard H. Popkin: Scepticism in the History of Philosophy (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7 (1). 1999.This publication is a review of RIchard H. Popkin's Scepticism in the History of Philosophy.
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228Does Information Have a Moral Worth in Itself?In CEPE 1998, Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry. 1998.The paper provides an axiological analysis of the concepts of respect for information and of information dignity from the vantage point provided by Information Ethics and the conceptual paradigm of object-oriented analysis (OOA). The general perspective adopted is that of an ontocentric approach to the philosophy of information ethics, according to which the latter is an expansion of environmental ethics towards a less biologically biased concept of a ‘centre of ethical worth’. The paper attempt…Read more
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150I filosofi: calciatori o giornalisti? La ricezione della filosofia italiana nel contesto anglosassoneIn Francesco Paolo Firrao & Società Filosofica Italiana (eds.), La filosofia italiana in discussione, Pearson Italia S.p.a.. 2001.
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1086What is the philosophy of information?Metaphilosophy 33 (1-2). 2002.Computational and information-theoretic research in philosophy has become increasingly fertile and pervasive, giving rise to a wealth of interesting results. In consequence, a new and vitally important field has emerged, the philosophy of information (PI). This essay is the first attempt to analyse the nature of PI systematically. PI is defined as the philosophical field concerned with the critical investigation of the conceptual nature and basic principles of information, including its dynamics…Read more
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538Ethics-based auditing of automated decision-making systems: nature, scope, and limitationsScience and Engineering Ethics 27 (4). 2021.Important decisions that impact humans lives, livelihoods, and the natural environment are increasingly being automated. Delegating tasks to so-called automated decision-making systems can improve efficiency and enable new solutions. However, these benefits are coupled with ethical challenges. For example, ADMS may produce discriminatory outcomes, violate individual privacy, and undermine human self-determination. New governance mechanisms are thus needed that help organisations design and deplo…Read more
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375Internet ethics: the constructionist values of homo poieticusIn Robert Cavalier (ed.), The Impact of the Internet on our moral lives, . pp. 195-214. 2005.In this chapter, we argue that the web is a poietically- enabling environment, which both enhances and requires the development of a “constructionist ethics”. We begin by explaining the appropriate concept of “constructionist ethics”, and analysing virtue ethics as the primary example. We then show why CyberEthics (or Computer Ethics, as it is also called) cannot be based on virtue ethics, yet needs to retain a constructionist approach. After providing evidence for significant poietic uses of th…Read more
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361Por una filosofía de la informaciónRevista Anthropos Huellas Del Conocimiento 214 44-50. 2007.La filosofía de la Información (FI) es una nueva disciplina filosófica que trata acerca de: A) la investigación crítica sobre la naturaleza conceptual y los principios básicos de la información, incluso de su dinámica (concretamente: la computación, es decir, la manipulación mecánica de los datos, y el flujo informacional, a saber, los diversos procesos de recogida, almacenamiento e intercambio de informaciones), su utilización (la denominada information ethics (o ética de la información') y sus…Read more
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294Global information ethics: the importance of being environmentally earnestInternational Journal of Technology and Human Interaction (IJTHI) 3 (3): 1-11. 2007.The paper argues that Information Ethics (IE) can provide a successful approach for coping with the challenges posed by our increasingly globalized reality. After a brief review of some of the most fundamental transformations brought about by the phenomenon of globalization, the article distinguishes between two ways of understanding Global Information Ethics, as an ethics of global communication or as a global-information ethics. It is then argued that cross-cultural, successful interactions am…Read more
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Infosfera. Etica e filosofia nell'età dell'informazione InfosphereGiappichelli. 2009.Infosfera di Luciano Floridi investe un ampio spettro di questioni, relative alla natura dell'informazione, degli agenti artificiali, della responsabilità nei sistemi multiagenti, dell'etica informatica, del ruolo dell'informazione nel ragionamento e nella logica, etc., nella consapevolezza che ci troviamo ad interagire in un ambiente intelligente ed ubiquo costituito di informazioni, che è già diventato più ampio delle rappresentazioni del mondo concepite in termini di cyberspazio o di spazio r…Read more
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