The Philosophical salon (LARB), 2020

It is not humanity that is failing: A manifesto

- Result of “the Onlife Initiative,” a one-year project funded by the European Commission to study the deployment of ICTs and its effects on the human condition - Inspires reflection on the ways in which a hyperconnected world forces the rethinking of the conceptual frameworks on which policies are built - Draws upon the work of a group of scholars from a wide range of disciplines including, anthropology, cognitive science, computer science, law, philosophy, political science What is the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the human condition? In order to address this question, in 2012 the European Commission organized a research project entitled The Onlife Initiative: concept reengineering for rethinking societal concerns in the digital transition. This volume collects the work of the Onlife Initiative. It explores how the development and widespread use of ICTs have a radical impact on the human condition. ICTs are not mere tools but rather social forces that are increasingly affecting our self-conception (who we are), our mutual interactions (how we socialise); our conception of reality (our metaphysics); and our interactions with reality (our agency). In each case, ICTs have a huge ethical, legal, and political significance, yet one with which we have begun to come to terms only recently. The impact exercised by ICTs is due to at least four major transformations: the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality; the blurring of the distinction between human, machine and nature; the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and the shift from the primacy of stand-alone things, properties, and binary relations, to the primacy of interactions, processes and networks. Such transformations are testing the foundations of our conceptual frameworks. Our current conceptual toolbox is no longer fitted to address new ICT-related challenges. This is not only a problem in itself. It is also a risk, because the lack of a clear understanding of our present time may easily lead to negative projections about the future. The goal of The Manifesto, and of the whole book that contextualises, is therefore that of contributing to the update of our philosophy. It is a constructive goal. The book is meant to be a positive contribution to rethinking the philosophy on which policies are built in a hyperconnected world, so that we may have a better chance of understanding our ICT-related problems and solving them satisfactorily. The Manifesto launches an open debate on the impacts of ICTs on public spaces, politics and societal expectations toward policymaking in the Digital Agenda for Europe’s remit. More broadly, it helps start a reflection on the way in which a hyperconnected world calls for rethinking the referential frameworks on which policies are built.

Twentyforty, 2020

In 2040, artificial intelligence will no longer be used to optimize human life, but to de-optimize it. This story is about making machines more human instead of making humans more like machines. It is about letting coincidence come back into our lives.

The Onlife Manifesto, 2014

In my inaugural lecture I have reiterated the notion of a computational turn, referring to the novel layers of software that have nested themselves between us and reality (Hildebrandt 2013). These layers of decisional algorithmic adaptations increasingly co-constitute our lifeworld, determine what we get to see (search engines; behavioural advertising), how we are treated (insurance, employment, education, medical treatment), what we know (the life sciences, the digital humanities, expert systems in a variety of professions) and how we manage our risks (safety, security, aviation, critical infrastructure, smart grids). So far, this computational turn has been applauded, taken for granted or rejected, but little attention has been paid to the far-reaching implications for our perception and cognition, for the rewoven fabric on which our living-together hinges (though there is a first attempt in Ess and Hagengruber 2011, and more elaboration in Berry 2012). The network effects of ubiquitous digitization have been described extensively , though many authors present this as a matter of 'the social', neglecting the extent to which the disruptions of networked, mobile, global digital technologies are indeed 'affordances' of the socio-technical assemblages of 'the digital'. Reducing these effects to 'the social' does not help, because this leaves the constitutive and regulative workings of these technologies under the radar. Moreover, we need to distinguish between digitization per se and computational techniques such L. Floridi (ed.), The Onlife Manifesto,

Mediações - Revista de Ciências Sociais, 2013

The European Physical Journal Special Topics -Change of the population structure (change of birth rate, migration); -Financial and economic instability (trust, consumption and investments; sovereign debt, taxation, and inflation/deflation; sustainability of social welfare systems, and so on); -Social, economic and political divide (among people of different gender, age, education, income, religion, culture, language, preferences); -Threats against health (due to the spreading of epidemics, but also to unhealthy diets and habits); -Unbalance of power in a multi-polar world; -Organized crime, including cyber-crime, social unrest and war; -Uncertainty in institutional design and dynamics (regarding regulations, authority, corruption, balance between global and local, central and decentralized systems); -Unethical usage of communication and information systems (cyber risks, violation of privacy, misuse of sensitive data, spam). In the last couple of years, social scientists have started to organize and classify the number, variety, and severity of criticalities, if not pathologies and failures, recurring in complex social systems . These are amongst the most severe social problems, difficult to predict and treat, and raising serious social alarm.

The Onlife Manifesto, 2014

Mary Midgley sees philosophy as plumbing, something that nobody notices until it goes wrong: 'Then suddenly we become aware of some bad smells, and we have to take up the floorboards and look at the concepts of even the most ordinary piece of thinking. The great philosophers … noticed how badly things were going wrong, and made suggestions about how they could be dealt with.' . The bad smells, as I perceive them, concern the proliferation of truisms (including about progress, change and innovation), wrong alternatives ("either/or" framing when the "both/and" would be much more efficient), and fears and delusion when it comes to thinking and speaking about politics and the public space. It would be wrong to say that we are in totalitarian times: fascism and communism have been defeated and democracy is alive, at least in the EU and other parts of the world. However, I feel that we are unconsciously undermining essential elements of the human condition, as set out by Hannah Arendt in her seminal book The human condition : the antidotes against the risk of totalitarianism are thereby weakened to a dangerous extent so that it would not take much more than a spark for the public space to collapse, and this even under the cover of the best governance intentions.

The End of The Future

*If you are interested in reading more please go to the books section of this page and select "The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digitial Sovereignty". 'The much-vaunted " end of history " may be an ideological phantasm, but there is such a thing as the end of the future—or, at least, a crisis of futurity.'-Hito Steyerl: Postcinematic Essays After the Future 'We have no future because our present is too volatile. The only possibility that remains is the management of risk. The spinning top of the scenarios of the present moment.'-William Gibson, Pattern Recognition In the twenty-first century the future has become a universal property based solely on information. What had been of material value for much of the twentieth century, began in the late 1980s to transferred its worth into the realm of raw data, forcing the self to reside in a place of constant and perpetual exposure, and its surrounding community to linger faintly amongst the remains its former desires. We have become content to simulate the future rather than generate it. This has been the case since the 1970s when information technologies began their ascent. These technologies accelerated us into an era we referred to in a premillenary moment as 'postmodernity'. Its hallmark was to postdate reality and replace it with 'what 'Jean Baudrillard and Eco used to call the " hyperreal "-the ability to make the imitation more realistic than the original' (Graeber 110). The postmodern prompted us to delight in the fact their was nothing new to look forward to and therefore our sensibilities must rely on the clever commands of 'simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation and pastiche' (110). The future that we dreamt about would never appear in our outward lives, rather its contents could be said to have imploded, its flattened image compressed down to nothing more ambitious than one can be fit within the ultrathin surface of a screen. In the race towards the future, it would seem the computers bested our imaginations. Ours was to become a technologically mediated environment and creation itself recast as a process of transfer of information and rearrangement of control played amongst existing forces-albeit somewhat modified ones. In the twenty-first century, the means of production are no longer functioning as a locus of power; that now resided with the ability to discipline the velocity and magnitude of information.

This essay ruminates the ethics of a co-implicated, bounded dependence between objects (human and otherwise) that are always in some sense withdrawing from each other but also always together in a some-place labeled "here": the world (where no Absolute or Outside vantage point is possible or habitable). This essay also considers the possibility, through literary studies, of building more capacious networks of more affectively companionable sentience (with texts seen as actants that possess sentience and what Jane Bennett calls "vibrant materiality").

Mathematics and Computer Education, 2013

This book deals with the progressive virtualisation of the world and its boundless impact on human existence. It analyses the role of computers, smartphones, social media, and the Internet at large and how these contribute to our understanding of the world. It covers the fundamentally changing landscape of today's social interactions and our changing perceptions of space and time, knowledge, social relationships, citizenship, power and control, culture, and eventually, life. Many thousands of years ago, we painted our first works of art on the walls of our caves. These were the first examples of our creation of a shared, mediated memory for consolidating and conveying messages. Thereafter, the invention of writing marked the birth of communication media. Individuals' valuable knowledge could now be recorded and preserved for future generations. Ever since, media have become more advanced and have helped to accumulate the knowledge and ideas that constitute our culture. All media are essentially cognition amplifiers. Cave paintings, clay tablets, books, and computers enable us to extend our cognitive capacities. Hence, media operate on the defining feature of our species. Physically, we are not in the same league as lions, cheetahs, or crocodiles, but we compensate for our shortcomings with our superior cognitive abilities. We've managed to defeat predators with conscious thought, intelligent strategies, and planned behaviours. Our cognition has been the decisive element of our evolutionary success and has made our species the ruler of the world. Today, our cognitive abilities are greatly strengthened by the ever-growing flow of digital media, tools, and devices that pervade our daily lives and connect us to the news and the communities and culture we are part of. They help us to answer questions, to solve problems, and to connect to any resource or person on Earth. Media stretch our mental horizons and help us to better understand the world and ourselves. Today we spend an ever larger portion of our lives in virtual spaces. But we easily go astray in the patchwork of media which is continually changing as new services and devices become available. The problem is that mediated communication fundamentally differs from the faceto-face communication that we are used to. The intermediate digital mechanisms restrict our opportunities for direct verification of the sincerity, reliability, and truth of messages. They make it hard for us to distinguish between appearance and reality, and from them we are likely to procure a distorted and truncated view of the world. The ongoing replacement of existing devices and software with newer and richer versions calls for a robust and sustainable approach to media literacy that breaks through superficial, volatile media features and uncovers the invariant key concepts of media and their interrelationships. The premise of this book is that we should understand the basic determinants and mechanisms of media, meaning, and cognition rather than the particular attributes of them or devices they're carried on that happen to be in vogue. The book reveals the underlying machinery of mediated communication and the ways we attach meaning to it. It explains how media transform our natural habitat and influence the ways we arrange our liveshow the media are transforming us. Therefore, the book is mainly about ourselves, superior cognitive beings that have managed to subject all other species on Earth. It is a compact guide to media literacy and to coping with the flood of digital media that is yet to come, making it an indispensable aid for every twenty-first century citizen. Chapter 1 The Unique Collection of Cells We Are It is hard to fully understand who we are and why we exist at all. We seem to have a conscious mind that has a notion of self and of the self's interaction with the environment. We have come to know a lot about the world, its phenomena, and its processes, and we have created an abundance of ingenious tools that have helped us to improve our lives. Not without endearment and compassion, we may look at our helpless ancestors, prehistoric humans and their evolutionary precursors, who lived in the savannas, restlessly chasing food and ruthlessly being chased by beasts of prey. Precursors to Homo sapiens such as Java man and Lucy must have lived in ignorance, knowing very littlewe supposeabout the world and the secrets of nature. If we could only see their faces as we showed them our skyscrapers, TVs, and aeroplanes! However, we should be modest, because what do we really understand about the world? What do we really understand about ourselves, our lives, our existence? To date, our conscious mind remains largely incomprehensible. We do not know whether humans will ever be capable of understanding what life is all about. At the same time, life is utterly fascinating because it's a mystery. How long it took Time is one of the most peculiar and intangible constructs. Any activity or event we experience is inevitably linked to this special singular point in time called "now". Whatever we do, we do it now, at this very moment, this steadily progressing point in time that relentlessly separates the future from the past. It is hard to fully capture and understand the significance of time. We may have a fair idea about the concepts of "yesterday", "next week", or "last month", but the longer durations of evolution or geology are simply beyond our imagination. But human life developed on exactly these time scales. The Earth is calculated to have existed for about 4.5 billion years. It is hard to find a reference point that helps us grasp the significance of such a huge number, but here are some examples: 4.5 billion equals the number of seconds in one century, the earth's circumference in centimetres, and the number of words written in 100 copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Not until 3.8 billion years ago did organic molecules form and group together to produce the first unicellular living creatures. If we condense Earth's 4.5 billion years of age into one year, starting on 1 January, life would emerge on 26 February. From there, gradually more complex forms of life developed: algae, fungi, trilobites, fish. For a long period, only the seas were populated, but some 500 million years ago, plants and animals left the water and started colonising the land. On our one-year scale, this happened on 21 November. The dinosaurs appeared on 13 December (225 million years ago) and went extinct on 26 December (65 million years ago). Still, we had to wait for Homo erectus, our direct ancestor with the peculiar habit of permanently balancing and moving upright on two legs. They arrived only on New Year's Eve at half past eight in the evening (1.8 million years ago). The brain of Homo erectus was remarkably large, up to 1,000 grams, twice the size of the brain of Australopithecus, the genus that preceded Homo, three times that of a chimpanzee's brain, and four times that of a lion. Then, at 23 minutes to midnight (200,000 years ago), a new type of human showed up with even more brain volume, up to 1,500 grams. For obvious reasons, this new species was called Homo sapiens: wise human. These early ancestors were intelligent creatures that used tools, Not too long ago, the first humans appeared. Conditions must have been tough in those days: the world was a mysterious and dangerous scene. Without appropriate knowledge, methods, and tools, procuring food, drink, clothing, and shelter was not straightforward. Humans had to cope with hunger, extreme weather conditions, diseases, injuries, and animals of prey. Our ancestors compensated for the greater strength, speed, and agility of bears, wolves, and other predators with our superior mental abilities, developing smart strategies for hiding and hunting. The human brain was capable of replacing instinctive impulses with well-considered anticipation, strategic thinking, and rational decision making. In the long run, these abilities worked out to be an unparalleled advantage. The human species has survived and even managed to rule the world, effectively subjecting all other species on Earth. The genesis of humanity looks very much like a success story. To a great extent it is. One may wonder how on earth this was possible at all. Before producing us, life had to go through a series of odd developmental stages. It had to manage to replicate its cells; to differentiate those cells into scales, gills and fins, brains, eyes, limbs, fur, hands, fingers, genitals; and to learn how to move, climb, fly, growl, mate, and do many more things. We are the outcome of a long evolutionary process in which the qualities that provided the best fit to the conditions of life were preserved and those that didn't were doomed to fade. Slight deviations in the prevailing conditions would have made us look completely different. We might have had six arms, three eyes, a trunk, plumage, a split tongue, or even antlers. The fact that you are reading this means that you're lucky enough to be alive, which is the ultimate proof that you're part of the evolutionary line that has survived the last 3.8 billion years. All your ancestors, whether they were amoebas, fish, or mammals, proved strong and healthy enough to grow to adulthood, develop fertility, and reproduce while they avoided getting wounded, eaten, or starved before passing on their genes. After transferring their DNA they were prepared, capable, and available to protect and raise their offspring successfully. Every individual today is the outcome of an uninterrupted line of successful mating and gene replication with a proven record of withstanding all the dangers and challenges around. So, if we truly are the best fit for the conditions of life, one might wonder why so many people need doctors, medications, surgery, and life-sustaining devices. The simple answer is that the very fact that we are capable of treating...