Luciano Floridi

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 concerning their responsibility. The conclusion is that there is substantial and important scope, particularly in information ethics, for the concept of moral artificial agents not necessarily exhibiting free will, mental states or responsibility. This complements the more traditional approach, which considers whether artificial agents may have mental states, feelings, emotions and so forth. By focussing directly on “mind-less morality”, one is able to by-pass such question as well as other difficulties arising in Artificial Intelligence, in order to tackle some vital issues in contexts where artificial agents are increasingly part of the everyday environment (Floridi L, Metaphilos 39(4/5): 651–655, 2008a).

The previous chapters have provided a detailed overview of the variety of ethical challenges posed by the development of ICTs. By way of conclusion, in this epilogue I would like to invite the reader to look into the possible future of Information and Computer Ethics. More specifically, I shall try to forecast how the convergence of two fundamental trends of our times, globalization and the development of the information society, may interact with the ethical problems analysed in this book. The exercise will not be based on some untenable technological determinism. Humanity is, and will remain, firmly in charge of its destiny and hence be responsible for it. Rather, it will mean adopting the farmer's view that, with enough intelligence, toil and a bit of luck, one might be able to tell today what one will probably reap tomorrow. Before trying to ‘look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not’ (Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Scene III, 59–62), two clarifications might be in order. First, the future of globalization is a phenomenon too complex even to sketch in this brief epilogue. For a synthetic, well-balanced and informed overview, the reader may wish to consult Held and McGrew (2001) and consider that this chapter is written from what Held et al. (1999)) have defined as a ‘transformationalist perspective’, according to which ‘globalization does not simply denote a shift in the extensity or scale of social relations and activity.

The post-Westphalian Nation State developed by becoming more and more an Information Society. However, in so doing, it progressively made itself less and less the main information agent, because what made the Nation State possible and then predominant, as a historical driving force in human politics, namely ICTs, is also what is now making it less central, in the social, political and economic life of humanity across the world. ICTs fluidify the topology of politics. They do not merely enable but actually promote (through management and empowerment) the agile, temporary and timely aggregation, disaggregation and re-aggregation of distributed groups around shared interests across old, rigid boundaries represented by social classes, political parties, ethnicity, language barriers, physical barriers, and so forth. This is generating a new tension between the Nation State, still understood as a major organisational institution, yet no longer monolithic but increasingly morphing into a multiagent system itself, and a variety of equally powerful, indeed sometimes even more politically influential and powerful, non-Statal organisations. Geo-politics is now global and increasingly non-territorial, but the Nation State still defines its identity and political legitimacy in terms of a sovereign territorial unit, as a Country. Such tension calls for a serious exercise in conceptual re-engineering: how should the new informational multiagent systems (MASs) be designed in such a way as to take full advantage of the socio-political progress made so far, while being able to deal successfully with the new global challenges (from the environment to the financial markets) that are undermining the legacy of that very progress? In the lecture, I shall defend an answer to this question in terms of a design of political MAS based on principles borrowed from information ethics.

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 reticolare.

In Floridi (2005), I argued that a definition of semantic information in terms of alethically-neutral content–that is, strings of well-formed and meaningful data that can be additionally qualified as true or untrue (false, for the classicists among us), depending on supervening evaluations–provides only necessary but insufficient conditions: if some content is to qualify as semantic information, it must also be true. One speaks of false information in the same way as one qualifies someone as a false friend, (i.e. not a friend at all). This leads to a refinement of the initial definition into: [Def]: p qualifies as semantic information if and only if p is (constituted by) well-formed, meaningful and veridical data. [Def] captures the general consensus reached by the debate and mentioned at the outset of this section. According to it, semantic information is, strictly speaking, inherently truth-constituted and not a contingent truth-bearer, exactly like knowledge but unlike propositions or beliefs, for example, which are what they are independently of their truth values and then, because of their truth-aptness, may be further qualified alethically.