As TIC a transformar o humano e a Filosofia a repensar o fenómeno

«Nanotechnology, the Internet of Things, Web 2.0, Semantic Web, cloud computing, motion-capturing games, smatphone apps, tablets and touch screens, GPS, Augmented Reality, artificial companions, unmanned drones, driveless cars, wearable computing devices, 3D painters, identity theft, online courses, social media, cyberwar… the technophile and the technophobe ask the same question: what’s next? The philosopher wonders what lies behind. Is there a unifying perspective from which all these phenomena may be interpreted as aspects of a single, macroscopic trend? Part of the dificulty of answering this question, is that we are still used to looking at ICTs as tools for interacting with the world and with each other. In fact, they had becoming enviromental, anthropological, social and interpretative forces. They are creating and shapping our intellectual and physical realities, changing our self-understanding, modifying how we relate to each others and ourselves, and upgrading how we interpret the world, and all this pervasively, profoundly, and relentlessly.

(…) I believe we are seeing the beginning of a profound cultural revolution, largely driven by ICTs. (…)

The information revolution that I discuss is a great opportunity for our future. So this is also a moderately optimistic book. I say “moderately” because the question is whethter we shall be able to make the most of our ICTs, while avoiding their worst consequences. (…) The great opportunity offered by ICTs comes with a huge intelectual responsability to understand them and take advantage of them in the right way. (…)

(…) The invitation to rethink the present and the future in an increasingly technologized world amounts to a request for a new philosophy of information that can apply to every aspect of our hyperhistorical condition. We need to look carefully at the roots of our culture and nurture them, precisely because we are rightly concerned with its leaves and flowers.

We know that the information society has its distant roots in the invention of writing, printing, and the mass media. However, it became a reality only recently, once the recording and transmiting facilities of ICTs evolved into processing capabalities. The profound and widespread transformation brought about by ICTs have caused a huge conceptual deficit. We clearly need philosophy to be on board and engaged, for the tasks ahead are serious. We need philosophy to grasp better the nature of information itself. We need philosophy to anticipate and steer the ethical impact of ICTs on us and on our environments. We need philosophy to improve the economic, social, and political dynamics of information. And we need philosophy to develop the right intelectual framework that can help us semanticize (give meaning to and make sense of) our new predicament. In short, we need a philosophy of information as a philosophy of our time for our time.»

Floridi, L. (2014). The 4^th Revolution. How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (pp. vi, vii, ix). Oxford: Oxford University Press.