What is the Human Project for our Digital Future?

Luciano Floridi Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information, University of Oxford Faculty Fellow and Chair of the Data Research Group, Alan Turing Institute

@Floridi | luciano.floridi@oii.ox.ac.uk

ONLIFE WORLD

Enveloping the world

INFOSPHERE

HYPERHISTORY

analogue/digital = the new brackish space Information society = the mangrove society

Five ethical challenges for the infosphere

Infosphere as a social experiment Good information behaviour

1 2 3 4 5

IoT and smart environments as social labs open/big data, smart algorithms/AI/machine learning, smart sensors, cloud computing…

1 2 3 4 5 Rural, Urban, Hyper-urban Infosphere Fairness and opportunities

the invisible, the opaque, and the salient

old/new obsolete/futuristic messy

Human, Biological, Artificial, Agency Competition and Collaboration

1 2 3 4 5

shared environment: past

shared environment: present

shared environment: future

1 2 3 4 5 Top-down Supply, bottom-up Demand E-governance and Democracy

alignment of e-supply and e-demand tolerant paternalism

1 2 3 4 5 Natural, Artificial, Synthetic Realities E-nvironmental Ethics

SMART 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age, The Climate Group, 2008

Feasible Sustainable

Acceptable Preferable

20th c.: crisis of founds. of mathematics 21st c.: crisis of founds. of human rights

Security

Privacy

Self-determination

Freedom of Expression and

Information

Apple-FBI

RTBF

FB-Trump

Snowden

EXCEPTIONALISM

Autonomy as -  self-determination -  self-regulation -  learning (rule changing) -  adaptability -  smart tasking … human exeptionalism?

TuringTuring

The Fourth Revolution

ANTHROPO-ECCENTRISM

Pico della Mirandola Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486).

Neither angels nor brutes (or robots).

Polytropos.

Travellers’ ethics: in the hands of our hosts. Right to protection and hospitality.

Dignity: masters of our own journeys, and keep our identities and our choices open.

Any technology/policy that manipulates such openness risks dehumanising us (Circe’s guests).

Human dignity as polytropy: anthropo-eccentric foundation for the right to privacy and individual control over our own constitutive information.

Travellers’ duties as guests: care and respect for the other. Caring stewardship counterpart of right to privacy.

We are special because we are Nature’s Beautiful Glitch

We are Nature’s Non-fatal Exception

We are Informational Organisms

Our Lives and Identities are informationally fragile

The Human Project must be friendly to the beautiful glitch

Analogue capitalism is based on consumerism. Digital capitalism should be based on “fosterism”.

THANK YOU

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@Floridi | luciano.floridi@oii.ox.ac.uk