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285Children of the fourth revolutionPhilosophy and Technology 24 (3): 227-232. 2011.The information society may be described as the fourth step of humanity’s fundamental nature and role in the universe, after Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, with Turing. This paper explores some of the salient implications of this, such as our status as information organisms (inforgs), and our future interactions with other smart, engineered artefacts with which we increasingly share our on life. environment.
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725Big data and their epistemological challengePhilosophy and Technology 25 (4): 435-437. 2012.Between 2006 and 2011, humanity accumulated 1,600 EB of data. As a result of this growth, there is now more data produced than available storage. This article explores the problem of “Big Data,” arguing for an epistemological approach as a possible solution to this ever-increasing challenge.
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141A proxy culturePhilosophy and Technology 28 (4). 2015.The culture that characterises mature information societies is now evolving from being a culture of signs and signification into a culture of proxies and interaction. Through a definition and discussion of proxies and degenerate proxies, this paper analyses the factors behind this evolution and the potential implications for such a major societal transformation.
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554A look into the future impact of ICT on our livesThe Information Society 23 (1): 59-64. 2007.This paper may be read as a sequel of a 1995 paper, published in this journal, in which I predicted what sort of transformations and problems were likely to affect the development of the Internet and our system of organised knowledge in the medium term. In this second attempt, I look at the future developments of Information and Communication Technologies and try to guess what their impact on our lives will be. The forecast is that, in information societies, the threshold between online and offl…Read more
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450Artificial intelligence's new frontier: Artificial companions and the fourth revolutionMetaphilosophy 39 (4-5): 651-655. 2008.Abstract: In this article I argue that the best way to understand the information turn is in terms of a fourth revolution in the long process of reassessing humanity's fundamental nature and role in the universe. We are not immobile, at the centre of the universe (Copernicus); we are not unnaturally distinct and different from the rest of the animal world (Darwin); and we are far from being entirely transparent to ourselves (Freud). We are now slowly accepting the idea that we might be informati…Read more
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495AI4People—an ethical framework for a good AI society: opportunities, risks, principles, and recommendationsMinds and Machines 28 (4): 689-707. 2018.This article reports the findings of AI4People, an Atomium—EISMD initiative designed to lay the foundations for a “Good AI Society”. We introduce the core opportunities and risks of AI for society; present a synthesis of five ethical principles that should undergird its development and adoption; and offer 20 concrete recommendations—to assess, to develop, to incentivise, and to support good AI—which in some cases may be undertaken directly by national or supranational policy makers, while in oth…Read more
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2784Artificial intelligence and the ‘Good Society’: the US, EU, and UK approachScience and Engineering Ethics 24 (2): 505-528. 2018.In October 2016, the White House, the European Parliament, and the UK House of Commons each issued a report outlining their visions on how to prepare society for the widespread use of artificial intelligence. In this article, we provide a comparative assessment of these three reports in order to facilitate the design of policies favourable to the development of a ‘good AI society’. To do so, we examine how each report addresses the following three topics: the development of a ‘good AI society’; …Read more
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366Artificial Evil and the Foundation of Computer EthicsSpringer Netherlands. 2001.Moral reasoning traditionally distinguishes two types of evil:moral (ME) and natural (NE). The standard view is that ME is the product of human agency and so includes phenomena such as war,torture and psychological cruelty; that NE is the product of nonhuman agency, and so includes natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, disease and famine; and finally, that more complex cases are appropriately analysed as a combination of ME and NE. Recently, as a result of developments in autonomous age…Read more
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173A defence of the principle of information closure against the sceptical objectionIn Hanne Andersen, Dennis Dieks, Wenceslao González, Thomas Uebel & Gregory Wheeler (eds.), New Challenges to Philosophy of Science, Springer Verlag. pp. 35--47. 2013.The topic of this paper may be introduced by fast zooming in and out of the philosophy of information. In recent years, philosophical interest in the nature of information has been increasing steadily. This has led to a focus on semantic information, and then on the logic of being informed, which has attracted analyses concentrating both on the statal sense in which S holds the information that p (this is what I mean by logic of being informed in the rest of this article) and on the actional sen…Read more
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220Artificial evil and the foundation of computer ethicsEtica E Politica 2 (2). 2000.Moral reasoning traditionally distinguishes two types of evil: moral and natural. The standard view is that ME is the product of human agency and so includes phenomena such as war, torture and psychological cruelty; that NE is the product of nonhuman agency, and so includes natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, disease and famine; and finally, that more complex cases are appropriately analysed as a combination of ME and NE. Recently, as a result of developments in autonomous agents in c…Read more
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801A defence of informational structural realismSynthese 161 (2): 219-253. 2008.This is the revised version of an invited keynote lecture delivered at the "1st Australian Computing and Philosophy Conference". The paper is divided into two parts. The first part defends an informational approach to structural realism. It does so in three steps. First, it is shown that, within the debate about structural realism, epistemic and ontic structural realism are reconcilable. It follows that a version of OSR is defensible from a structuralist-friendly position. Second, it is argued t…Read more
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824Against digital ontologySynthese 168 (1). 2009.The paper argues that digital ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is digital, and the universe is a computational system equivalent to a Turing Machine) should be carefully distinguished from informational ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is structural), in order to abandon the former and retain only the latter as a promising line of research. Digital vs. analogue is a Boolean dichotomy typical of our computational paradigm, but digital and analogue are only “modes of presentation” …Read more
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80Artificial Companions and their Philosophical ChallengesDialogue and Universalism 19 (1-2): 31-36. 2009.In this paper I argue that recent technological transformations in the life-cycle of information have brought about a fourth revolution, in the long process of reassessing humanity’s fundamental nature and role in the universe, namely the idea that we might be informational organisms among many agents, inforgs not so dramatically different from clever, engineered artefacts, but sharing with them a global environment that is ultimately made of information, the infosphere. In view of this importan…Read more
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695The design of the internet’s architecture by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and human rightsScience and Engineering Ethics 23 (2). 2017.The debate on whether and how the Internet can protect and foster human rights has become a defining issue of our time. This debate often focuses on Internet governance from a regulatory perspective, underestimating the influence and power of the governance of the Internet’s architecture. The technical decisions made by Internet Standard Developing Organisations that build and maintain the technical infrastructure of the Internet influences how information flows. They rearrange the shape of the …Read more
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699The enduring scandal of deduction: is propositional logic really uninformative?Synthese 167 (2): 271-315. 2009.Deductive inference is usually regarded as being “tautological” or “analytical”: the information conveyed by the conclusion is contained in the information conveyed by the premises. This idea, however, clashes with the undecidability of first-order logic and with the (likely) intractability of Boolean logic. In this article, we address the problem both from the semantic and the proof-theoretical point of view. We propose a hierarchy of propositional logics that are all tractable (i.e. decidable …Read more
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274Towards the ethical publication of country of origin information (COI) in the asylum processMinds and Machines 30 (2): 247-257. 2020.This article addresses the question of how ‘Country of Origin Information’ reports—that is, research developed and used to support decision-making in the asylum process—can be published in an ethical manner. The article focuses on the risk that published COI reports could be misused and thereby harm the subjects of the reports and/or those involved in their development. It supports a situational approach to assessing data ethics when publishing COI reports, whereby COI service providers must wei…Read more
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399Ethical foresight analysis: what it is and why it is needed?Minds and Machines 30 (1): 77-97. 2020.An increasing number of technology firms are implementing processes to identify and evaluate the ethical risks of their systems and products. A key part of these review processes is to foresee potential impacts of these technologies on different groups of users. In this article, we use the expression Ethical Foresight Analysis to refer to a variety of analytical strategies for anticipating or predicting the ethical issues that new technological artefacts, services, and applications may raise. Th…Read more
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379AI and its new winter: from myths to realitiesPhilosophy and Technology 33 (1): 1-3. 2020.An AI winter may be defined as the stage when technology, business, and the media come to terms with what AI can or cannot really do as a technology without exaggeration. Through discussion of previous AI winters, this paper examines the hype cycle (which by turn characterises AI as a social panacea or a nightmare of apocalyptic proportions) and argues that AI should be treated as a normal technology, neither as a miracle nor as a plague, but rather as of the many solutions that human ingenuity …Read more
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2607Recommender systems and their ethical challengesAI and Society (4): 957-967. 2020.This article presents the first, systematic analysis of the ethical challenges posed by recommender systems through a literature review. The article identifies six areas of concern, and maps them onto a proposed taxonomy of different kinds of ethical impact. The analysis uncovers a gap in the literature: currently user-centred approaches do not consider the interests of a variety of other stakeholders—as opposed to just the receivers of a recommendation—in assessing the ethical impacts of a reco…Read more
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14Scepticism and the foundation of epistemology: a study in the metalogical fallaciesPhilosophical and Phenomenological Research 61 (3). 2000.
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320Enabling posthumous medical data donation: a plea for the ethical utilisation of personal health dataIn Peter Dabrock, Matthias Braun & Patrik Hummel (eds.), The Ethics of Medical Data Donation, Springer Verlag. 2019.This article argues that personal medical data should be made available for scientific research, by enabling and encouraging individuals to donate their medical records once deceased, in a way similar to how they can already donate organs or bodies. This research is part of a project on posthumous medical data donation developed by the Digital Ethics Lab at the Oxford Internet Institute. Ten arguments are provided to support the need to foster posthumous medical data donation. Two major risks ar…Read more
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657The fourth revolution: how the infosphere is reshaping human realityOxford University Press UK. 2014.Who are we, and how do we relate to each other? Luciano Floridi, one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy, argues that the explosive developments in Information and Communication Technologies is changing the answer to these fundamental human questions. As the boundaries between life online and offline break down, and we become seamlessly connected to each other and surrounded by smart, responsive objects, we are all becoming integrated into an "infosphere". Personas we adopt in soci…Read more
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1822The ethics of digital well-being: a thematic reviewScience and Engineering Ethics 26 (4). 2020.This article presents the first thematic review of the literature on the ethical issues concerning digital well-being. The term ‘digital well-being’ is used to refer to the impact of digital technologies on what it means to live a life that is good for a human being. The review explores the existing literature on the ethics of digital well-being, with the goal of mapping the current debate and identifying open questions for future research. The review identifies major issues related to several k…Read more
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47Considerazioni sull’infosfera. S&F : a colloquio con Luciano FloridiScientia et Fides 22. 2019.New developments in the field of communication and information technology will profoundly reshape the answers to questions of deep interest for humanity and philosophy. Who are we and what kind of relationship we establish among us? The boundaries between real life and virtual life tend to evanish. We are progressively becoming part of a global “infosphere”. This candid interview with professor Floridi try to shed some light on these issues, by considering the philosophical framework developed b…Read more
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607From what to how: an initial review of publicly available AI ethics tools, methods and research to translate principles into practicesScience and Engineering Ethics 26 (4): 2141-2168. 2020.The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s :741–742, 1960; Wiener in Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press, New York, 1961). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the consequence that the ethical debate has gone mainstream. Such a debat…Read more
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