UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
		 COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

			      presents

	      "A Look into the Future Impact of Information
		& Communication Technology on Our Lives"

			 Prof. Luciano Floridi
	     (Dept. of Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire,
		& St. Cross College, University of Oxford)


		      28 November 2007 Wednesday

			  Lecture Theatre E350
		       Hatfield, College Lane Campus
			       3 - 4 pm

	       Coffee/tea and biscuits will be available.

		    Everyone is Welcome to Attend



Abstract:

In 1995, I was invited to give a keynote speech at the UNESCO
headquarters in Paris, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the
organization. On that occasion, I was asked to predict what sort of
transformations and problems were likely to affect the development of
the Internet and our system of organized knowledge in the medium term
(Floridi 1996). They say there are only two kinds of predictions: wrong
and lucky. Mine was lucky, and so I thought I might tempt fate once
more. Ten years later, I shall not be concerned with the system of
organized knowledge. Rather, I shall focus, more generally, on future
developments in ICTs and their impact on our lives. And since there
would be no merit in predicting the obvious, I will avoid issues such
as rising concerns about privacy and identity theft, spamming, viruses,
or the importance of semantic tagging, online shopping, virtual
communities and artificial agents. Nor will I try to steal ideas from
those who know better than I do the future development of the actual
technologies (see for example O'Reilly [2005], Microsoft Research 
[2005], Nature [2006]). I will, instead, stick to what philosophers 
do better, conceptual engineering, and seek to capture the new 
Weltanschauung that might be dawning on us. I shall try to guess what 
impact the future developments of Information and Communication 
Technologies will have on our lives. The forecast is that, in information 
societies, the threshold between online and offline will soon disappear, 
and that once there won't be any difference, we shall become not cyborgs 
but rather inforgs, i.e. connected informational organisms.


References

Floridi, L. 1995, "Internet: Which Future for Organized Knowledge,
Frankenstein or Pygmalion?" International Journal of Human-Computer
Studies 43, 261-274.  http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/pdf/frank.pdf
Microsoft Research 2005, "Towards 2020 Science".
http://research.microsoft.com/towards2020science/background_overview.htm
Nature 2006, "2020 - Future of Computing", 440.
O'Reilly, T. 2005, What Is Web 2.0 - Design Patterns and Business
Models for the Next Generation of Software,
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq