Philosophy of information

Call for Chapter Abstracts for the Book Luciano Floridi`s Philosophy of Technology: Critical Reflections

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:09:00 +0000

Call for Chapter Abstracts for the Book

Luciano Floridi`s Philosophy of Technology: Critical Reflections

Publisher: Springer (Philosophy of Engineering and Technology Book Series) Book Series Editor in Chief: Vermaas, P. The Volume Editor: Ibo van de Poel

Guest Editor for the volume: Hilmi Demir.

Chapter submissions until June 15, 2010 to hilmi@bilkent.edu.tr

The collected volume focuses on Luciano Floridi`s Philosophy of Technology and will explore both the philosophical and empirical aspects of his theory. Here is a sample of the issues that we intend to cover within the framework of the collected volume.

1. The nature of information
2. Ethics and Information Technology
3. Knowledge and Technology
4. The notion of `being informed` and its formal analysis
5. Floridi`s notion of `Levels of Abstraction`
6. Philosophy of Computing and AI
7. Philosophy of Technology and Education
8. Floridi`s notion of `infosphere`
9. Cognitive Technology and `inforgs`
10. The informational turn as a fourth revolution after the Copernican, the Darwinian and the Freudian revolutions.
11. Online identity and Floridi`s informational structural realism.

Chapters should normally be between 7000 and 10000 words in length, although longer chapters, of up to 15000 words, might also be accepted for publication.

Sincerely,
Hilmi Demir
Guest Editor

Legal Deposit Act

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 09:13:00 +0000

This is a short interview for The Oxford Student on Brittain's Department for Culture, Media and Sport's recent proposal on the implementation of the 2003 Legal Deposit Act as regards websites (http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/consultations/Digital_legal_deposit.pdf).

Tendai Musakwa:
In the proposal, the department suggests deposit libraries such as the Bodleian be legally empowered to archive freely available websites to document Britain's history.
1. What is your view on allowing deposit libraries to archive websites?

Luciano Floridi:
It is an excellent and timely idea. The online and digital nature of most of our data means that we can easily rewrite, lose or erase vast amounts of irreplaceable information. We need to use our technologies at their best in order to cope with their forgetful memories.

Tendai Musakwa:
2. The British Library has expressed dismay at the delay in implementing website deposit regulations since the 2003 act, warning that earlier versions of websites are usually deleted such that the UK has lost millions of pages recording events such as the MPs' expenses scandal, the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the Iraq war because the websites were not archived. In your view, is there an urgent need to implement regulations on e-deposit?

Luciano Floridi:
Absolutely. The Museum of the Moving Image, for example, has a very valuable record of the web-based campaigns for the 2008 Presidential Election in the US (http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/). Without such projects, future generations will have limited access to their historical past, cultural heritage and hence self-understanding.

Tendai Musakwa:
3. What are the potential implications of implementing the 2003 Legal Deposit Act as regards the archiving of websites on intellectual life and the UK's cultural heritage?

Luciano Floridi:
I'd like to select two in particular. We need to ensure that the archiving is fair, because what will not be archived might disappear forever; and that the accumulation of memories will not be a burden for the future, because, sometimes, forgiving requires a bit of forgetting. We should beware of what we wish to remember, because it might be a way of keeping our wounds forever open.

Barwise Prize

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:16:00 +0000

I have delivered the Barwise Lecture at the APA Meeting on the 29th of December 2009 in NY.

This is the prize.

Two Philosophers of the Information Age

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:23:00 +0000

THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY: METAPHILOSOPHICAL DIRECTIONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY.

A Symposium Marking the 40th Anniversary of the Founding of the Journal Metaphilosophy. FRIDAY 11 DECEMBER, Institute of Philosophy, School of Avanced Studies, London.

Terrell Ward Bynum's lecture: Two Philosophers of the Information Age: Robert Wiener and Luciano Floridi.

New introduction to information and computer ethics

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 09:50:00 +0000

The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics
Edited by Luciano Floridi

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have profoundly changed many aspects of life, including the nature of entertainment, work, communication, education, healthcare, industrial production and business, social relations and conflicts. They have had a radical and widespread impact on our moral lives and hence on contemporary ethical debates. The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics provides an ambitious and authoritative introduction to the field, with discussions of a range of topics including privacy, ownership, freedom of speech, responsibility, technological determinism, the digital divide, cyber warfare, and online pornography. It offers an accessible and thoughtful survey of the transformations brought about by ICTs and their implications for the future of human life and society, for the evaluation of behaviour, and for the evolution of moral values and rights. It will be a valuable book for all who are interested in the ethical aspects of the information society in which we live.

Preface Luciano Floridi

Part I. Introduction and Background
1. Ethics after the information revolution, Luciano Floridi
2. The historical roots of information and computer ethics, Terrell Ward Bynum

Part II. Ethical Approaches
3. Values in technology and disclosive computer ethics, Phil Brey
4. The use of normative theories in computer ethics, Jeroen van den Hoven
5. Information ethics, Luciano Floridi

Part III. Ethical Issues in the Information Society
6. Social issues in computer ethics, Bernd Carsten Stahl
7. Rights and computer ethics, John Sullins
8. Conflict, security and computer ethics, John Arquilla
9. Personal values and computer ethics, Alison Adam
10. Global information and computer ethics, Charles Ess and May Thorseth
11. Computer ethics and applied contexts, John Weckert and Adam Henschke

Part IV. Ethical Issues in Artificial Contexts
12. The ethics of IT artefacts, Vincent Wiegel
13. Artificial life, artificial agents, virtual realities: technologies of autonomous agency, Colin Allen
14. On new technologies, Steve Clarke

Part V. Metaethics
15. The foundationalist debate in computer ethics, Herman Tavani

Epilogue
The ethics of the information society in a globalised world, Luciano Floridi

If you are interested in understanding what information is

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:40:00 +0000

Information: A Very Short Introduction
Luciano Floridi
Very Short Introductions
152 pages | 15 black and white line drawings | 174x111mm
978-0-19-955137-8 | Paperback | February 2010
Price: £7.99

Explores a concept central to modern science and society, from thermodynamics and DNA to our use of the mobile phone and the Internet.
Considers concepts such as 'Infoglut' (too much information to process) and the emergence of an information society.
Addresses the meaning and value of information in science, sociology, and philosophy.
Raises the broader social and ethical issues relating to privacy, accessibility, and ownership of information.

We live an information-soaked existence - information pours into our lives through television, radio, books, and of course, the Internet. Some say we suffer from 'infoglut'. But what is information? The concept of 'information' is a profound one, rooted in mathematics, central to whole branches of science, yet with implications on every aspect of our everyday lives: DNA provides the information to create us; we learn through the information fed to us; we relate to each other through information transfer - gossip, lectures, reading. Information is not only a mathematically powerful concept, but its critical role in society raises wider ethical issues: who owns information? Who controls its dissemination? Who has access to information? Luciano Floridi, a philosopher of information, cuts across many subjects, from a brief look at the mathematical roots of information - its definition and measurement in 'bits'- to its role in genetics (we are information), and its social meaning and value. He ends by considering the ethics of information, including issues of ownership, privacy, and accessibility; copyright and open source.For those unfamiliar with its precise meaning and wide applicability as a philosophical concept, 'information' may seem a bland or mundane topic. Those who have studied some science or philosophy or sociology will already be aware of its centrality and richness. But for all readers, whether from the humanities or sciences, Floridi gives a fascinating and inspirational introduction to this most fundamental of ideas.

Readership: General readers and students of science, sociology/communication, computing, information processing and philosophy.

Introduction

1: The information revolution

2: The language of information

3: Mathematical information

4: Semantic information

5: Physical information
6: Biological information
7: Economic information
8: The ethics of information
Conclusion
References

CFP - Towards a Comprehensive Intelligence Test (TCIT) - Reconsidering the Turing Test for the 21st Century Symposium

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:44:00 +0000

Call for Paper

Towards a Comprehensive Intelligence Test (TCIT)

Reconsidering the Turing Test for the 21st Century Symposium

http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~aayesh/TuringTestRevisited/

At AISB2010 Convention

Leicester, UK

29th March – 1st April 2010

2010 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Turing’s paper, in which he outlined his test for machine intelligence. Turing suggested that the possibility of genuine machine thought should be replaced by a simple behaviour-based process in which a human interrogator converses blindly with a machine and another human. Although the precise nature of the test has been debated, the standard interpretation is that if, after five minutes interaction, the interrogator cannot reliably tell which respondent is the human and which the machine then the machine can be qualified as a 'thinking machine'. Through the years, this test has become synonymous as 'the benchmark' for Artificial Intelligence in popular culture. However, new advances in cognitive sciences and consciousness studies suggest it may be useful to revisit this test. The aim of this symposium is to reconsider the Turing Test in the light of current advances in Artificial Intelligence, cognitive systems, and other competitions that provide insights into different types of intelligence, with the goal of outlining a new test - or suite of tests - that may more usefully be employed to evaluate 'machine intelligence' at the dawn of the 21st century.

DEADLINES

Submission deadline for all formats: 11 January 2010

Late and by arrangement submissions deadline (e.g. competitions): 20 January 2010

Acceptance notification: 11 February 2010

Camera ready copies: 1 March 2010

Convention: 29 March - 1 April 2010

Submission is through easychair web site:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tcit2010

FORMATS

Full research papers: up to 10 pages

Short Position papers: up to 4 pages

Posters: a single sheet, preferably A1 or A2 size.

System Demonstrations: descriptive A4 sheet and software.

Competition proposal: up to 2 pages, this should go beyond an extended abstract and specify the competition goals and give its operational details.

Competition performance report: up to 2 pages.

Running a competition for demonstration: this is by arrangement only. Please contact the symposium chair (Aladdin Ayesh: aayesh@dmu.ac.uk) to agree on details.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Aladdin Ayesh (De Montfort,Symposium Chair)

Mark Bishop (Goldsmith College, London)

Luciano Floridi (Hertfordshire/Oxford)

Kevin Warwick (Reading)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Selmer Bringsjord (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

Bernd Carsten Stahl (De Montfort)

James Moor (Dartmouth College)

John Preston (Reading)

Ray Tuner (Essex)

Robb Wilcox (NRG)

La révolution numérique considérée comme une quatrième révolution

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:19:00 +0000

Patrick Peccatte La révolution numérique considérée comme une quatrième révolution, par Luciano Floridi
http://blog.tuquoque.com/post/2009/11/03/revolution-numerique-quatrieme-revolution

How information becomes knowledge

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 12:06:00 +0000

Semantic Information and The Network Theory of Account (forthcoming in Synthese)

The article addresses the problem of how semantic information can be upgraded to knowledge. The introductory section explains the technical terminology and the relevant background. Section two argues that, for semantic information to be upgraded to knowledge, it is necessary and sufficient to be embedded in a network of questions and answers that correctly accounts for it. Section three shows that an information flow network of type A fulfils such a requirement, by warranting that the erotetic deficit, characterising the target semantic information t by default, is correctly satisfied by the information flow of correct answers provided by an informational source s. Section four illustrates some of the major advantages of such a Network Theory of Account (NTA) and clears the ground of a few potential difficulties. Section five clarifies why NTA and an informational analysis of knowledge, according to which knowledge is accounted semantic information, is not subject to Gettier-type counterexamples. A concluding section briefly summarises the results obtained.

Simulations and Their Philosophical Implications

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:01:00 +0000

NACAP 2010 @ Carnegie Mellon University - July 24-26, 2010

Simulations and Their Philosophical Implications

Call for Papers/Proposals

Deadline: February 1st 2010 (firm)

In honor of the 60th Anniversary of the publication of Alan Turing’s groundbreaking article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” we are centering the 2010 NACAP Conference on simulations and their philosophical implications.

Since the inception of the computer, simulations have become ubiquitous tools of the trade in a wide range of disciplines from astrophysics to sociology, machine learning to logic. When experiments aren’t possible for a variety of reasons (e.g., financial, ethical, lack of a subject pool), researchers have increasingly turned to simulations to test theories, comb through data, make predictions or otherwise take knowledge in new directions. This conference will explore the philosophical implications of this increasing reliance on simulation as it applies to the broader scope of topics studied by our association.

To this end, we are interested in receiving submissions that explore themes in the intersection of philosophy and computing insofar as they involve, for instance:

Evolutionary game theory
Machine learning
Cognitive science
Political science and sociology
Molecular biology
The uses of simulation in the physical sciences
Automated theorem proving
Validating models with simulations

Individual submissions might address a range of subtopics, including the epistemic legitimacy of simulations, theoretical analyses of simulation, the implications of computer simulations for issues in the philosophy of mind, etc. We also welcome submissions not directly on the conference theme, though first preference will go to those that fit within the broad parameters outlined here.

We welcome submissions for papers, panels and demonstrations of computing and philosophy applications. Papers and demonstrations will be allotted 40 minutes, including time for commentary and questions (25 minutes for presentation, 5 for commentary and 10 for Q&A). 120-minute slots are available for panels and can be divided as the panelists see fit.

For papers, please limit submission length to 3,000 words, keeping in mind that the IACAP discourages participants from reading their papers to the audience. (Many presenters prepare slides using PowerPoint or some other software package. However, these need not be submitted with your original paper.) Include also a 250-word abstract.

The IACAP discourages "show-and-tell" demonstrations, but welcomes submissions that show a new and interesting application of computers to philosophy. Submissions in this category should consist of a 1,500-word abstract outlining what is innovative about the application and the questions pertinent to philosophy that your demonstration will raise.

For panels, please submit a 1,000-word summary of the panel as a whole, along with 300 to 500-word abstracts for each of its various components.

The conference will be accepting electronic submissions appropriately prepared for blind review on or before February 1st, 2010. Additional details will be sent in a separate CFP sometime in early December, 2009. They will also be posted to the IACAP website at http://ia-cap.org (follow the appropriate conference link) and mailed to the IACAP-announce mailing list. (See http://ia-cap.org/mailinglist.php to join.)

Arsenic and e-Health

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:20:00 +0000

Monsieur Homais is one of the less likable characters in Madame Bovary. The deceitful pharmacist fakes a deep friendship for Charles Bovary. In fact, he constantly undermines his reputation with his patients, thus contributing to Charles’ ruin.

Monsieur Homais is not merely wicked. A smart man, he has been convicted in the past for practicing medicine without a license and so he worries, very reasonably, that Charles might denounce him to the authorities for the illicit business of health advice and personal consultations that he keeps organising in his pharmacy.

The ultimate success of the pharmacist's dodgy schemes is not surprising. Those were the days when blacksmiths and barbers could regularly act as dentists and surgeons (after all, Charles is not a doctor either, but only a “health officer”); patients and doctors had to meet face to face in order to interact; and access to health information was the privilege of a few. Mail and telegraph messages were of course commonly available, but neither allowed real-time conversations. Madame Bovary was serialised in 1856, exactly twenty years before Bell was awarded a patent for the electric telephone by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Once ICT (information and communication technologies) of all kinds began to make possible quick consultations and rapid responses, being “on call” acquired a new meaning, telemedicine was born, and the Monsieur Homaiss around the world started to find it increasingly harder to make a living.

Today, we ordinarily speak of e-Health or Health 2.0 as the most recent development in healthcare practices, which are increasingly patient-centred, not just patient-oriented.

Definitions vary, but put simply e-Health is the answer to “what have computer scientists ever done for our health?”. From the empowerment of individuals, who regularly access health-related information on the web, to specialised applications for monitoring populations of patients through their mobile phone, e-Health is a macroscopic phenomenon, which is fast spreading and has immense potentialities.

Two conferences recently organised in the Netherlands – the Second Health 2.0 Conference and the First International E-Mental Health Summit – well illustrate the exponential growth of e-Health and its popularity.

Behind the success of ICT-based medicine and well-being lie two phenomena and two trends.

The first phenomenon may be labelled “the transparent body”. By measuring, monitoring and managing our bodies ever more deeply, accurately and non-invasively, ICT have made us more easily explorable, have increased the scope of possible interactions from without and from within our bodies (e.g. nanotechnology), and made the boundaries between body and environment increasingly porous (e.g. fMRI). We were black boxes, we are quickly becoming white boxes through which anyone can see.

The second phenomenon is that of “the shared body”. “My” body can now be easily seen as a “type” of body, thus easing the shift from “my health conditions” to “health conditions I share with others”. And it is more and more natural to consider oneself not only the source of information (what I tell the doctor) or the owner of information about oneself (my Google health profile), but also a channel to transfer DNA information and corresponding biological features between past and future generations (see 23andme).

The correlated trends are a democratization of health information, which is available, accessible to, and owned by more citizens of any modern Yonville than ever before.

And the socialisation of health conditions: you only need to check “multiple sclerosis” on YouTube, for example, to appreciate how easily and significantly can ICT shape and transform our sense of belonging to a community.

By 2018, the world population will consist of more people over 65 than children under 5, for the first time in the history of humanity. We are getting older, more educated and wealthier, so e-Health can only become an increasingly common, daily experience, one of the pillars of future medical care, and obviously a multi-billion-dollar business, some of which will inevitably be dodgy. Which of course leads us back to Monsieur Homais.

Emma learns from him how to acquire the arsenic with which she will commit suicide. During her horrible agony, her husband desperately “tried to look up his medical dictionary, but could not read it”. Nowadays you only need the usual Wikipedia. Just check under Arsenic poisoning. You will find there both diagnosis and treatment.

How to see a masterpiece: Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, organ

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:27:00 +0000

Google Acquisitions and Investments

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 10:57:00 +0000

http://www.meettheboss.com/google-acquisitions-and-investments.html

5th Annual Digital Assembly Conference

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 09:56:00 +0000

5th Annual Digital Assembly Conference, Futures of Digital Studies 2010.
University of Florida, February 25-27
For more information please visit http://www.english.ufl.edu/da/

The Body as Interface

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:10:00 +0000

Victory at Bletchley Park Day

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:07:00 +0000

`Victory at Bletchley Park Day' - Bletchley Park to receive Heritage
Lottery Fund development grant.
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/592098

Project 10 to the 100th

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:55:00 +0000

Q: What is Project 10¹⁰⁰? A: Project 10¹⁰⁰ (pronounced "Project 10 to the 100th") is a call for ideas to change the world, in the hope of helping as many people as possible.
Q: Why is Google doing this? A: The short answer is that we think helping people is a good thing, and empowering people to help others is an even better thing. Here's the long answer.
Q: How many ideas are you funding? A: We have committed $10 million to fund up to five ideas selected by our advisory board.

2012 - The Alan Turing Year

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:30:00 +0000

The Alan Turing Year webpage at http://www.turingcentenary.eu/ has been updated.

The future of interfaces?

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:35:00 +0000

UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:59:00 +0000

UNESCO has established its first Chair in Information and Computer Ethics. More news from AlphaGalileo

BBC - Digital Revolution (Working Title) - Digital Revolution

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:55:00 +0000

BBC - Digital Revolution (Working Title) - Digital Revolution

http://www.bbc.co.uk/digitalrevolution/

An open and collaborative documentary on the way the web is changing the world.

Two new elected fellows of the AISB

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:47:00 +0000

Founded in 1964, the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) is the oldest artificial intelligence society in the world.

This year, AISB eleted two new fellows: Professor Michael Wooldridge, Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, for his research on multiagent systems, and your blogger, for his research on the philosophy of information.

Computers and logic

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:47:00 +0000

Computers are logical, or at least that’s what we hope. It is a relief to know that the receivers of so much attention, from so many people, and for such long hours are dependable systems, with no inclinations, temperament, or minds of their own.

People, on the other hand, are crazy, or so we often suspect. They buy lottery tickets aware of the odds, smoke despite being literate, and believe that black cats could seriously damage their health. This is perhaps why we use computers to try to inculcate some logic in their heads. There is, however, a catch. You would not use a washing machine to teach your nephew how to clean his t-shirt. Likewise, our computers do very weird things in order to see that 5 + 7 = 12. So how can we rely on weird machines to teach logic to crazy minds?

Although not exactly worded in this way, computer-based logic teaching was one of the themes addressed by several papers presented at two conferences recently organised by the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (www.ia-cap.org) at Indiana University and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

The debate is far from new. Forms of e-Learning are almost as old as the first computers. The animosity between supporters and detractors is equally well-known. A perceivable difference between the two conferences was the sense of relaxed interest expressed in Barcelona, as opposed to the pragmatic urgency felt in Bloomington. It is the three digits syndrome. Force people to teach and mark baby logic to hundreds of students every year, and they will soon start looking for some mechanical way of saving time. The risk is that, after a while, one may be adapting the teaching to what can be delivered electronically. So, after a longer while, the question arises: are we computationally pampering our students, teaching them something that hardly resembles the real activities of logicians and mathematicians when they are trying to solve problems and prove theorems?

The question soon leads to a more radical doubt: isn’t any introduction to logic so far from the actual practices to be utterly useless to any serious philosophy student? The question has two answers, none of which attracted much attention during the meetings.

First, we teach logic because this is the language spoken by a large portion of contemporary philosophy. You cannot understand the Tractatus if you have no idea of what a truth table is. This has nothing to do with what logicians and mathematicians write on their blackboards. As in any language learning process, however, computers can be of some help only insofar as they are running seriously interactive programs. Ultimately, conversations with native speakers remain essential.

Second, some teachers seem to think that we teach logic because the formal training will help to regiment the aforementioned crazy minds. This is a mistake that was elegantly made by Gilbert Ryle in his Tarner Lectures (published with the title Dilemmas, 1953). There we find the analogy between formal logic and military drill: “It is not the stereotyped motions of drill, but its standards of perfection of control which are transmitted from the parade-ground to the battlefield... To know how to go through completely stereotyped movements in artificial parade-ground conditions with perfect correctness is to have learned not indeed how to conduct oneself in battle but how rigorously to apply standards of soldierly efficiency even to unrehearsed actions and decisions in novel and nasty situations and in irregular and unfamiliar country.” Apply this to e-Learning and you will have computers training robots.

All this is more dangerous than merely silly. One of the quotes from All Quiet on the Western Front, the film on the horrors of the First World War based on Remarque’s classic novel, tells a different story: “They never taught us anything really useful, like how to light a cigarette in the wind, or make a fire out of wet wood, or bayonet a man in the belly instead of the ribs where it gets jammed”. In this case too, interaction is essential. So the second answer is not brainless drills, but intelligent simulations. But interactions and simulations lead us to the last difficulty: money. Governments easily spend millions of dollars to develop combat interactive scenarios, but they will never finance a logic simulator. Crazy isn’t it?

Metalogic: An Introduction to the Metatheory of Standard First Order Logic

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:36:00 +0000

An excellent book, old but still very readable and reliable: Metalogic: An Introduction to the Metatheory of Standard First Order Logic.

Highly recommended summer-reading to any philosophy student.

Web 2.0 contre Web sémantique : un point de vue philosophique

luciano.floridi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (Luciano Floridi) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:13:00 +0000

Very kindly, Patrick Peccatte has just made available his French translation of my article Web 2.0 vs. the Semantic Web: A Philosophical Assessment.
Thank you Patrick!

Philosophy of information

Call for Chapter Abstracts for the Book Luciano Floridi`s Philosophy of Technology: Critical Reflections

Legal Deposit Act

Barwise Prize

Two Philosophers of the Information Age

New introduction to information and computer ethics

If you are interested in understanding what information is

CFP - Towards a Comprehensive Intelligence Test (TCIT) - Reconsidering the Turing Test for the 21st Century Symposium

La révolution numérique considérée comme une quatrième révolution

Patrick Peccatte La révolution numérique considérée comme une quatrième révolution, par Luciano Floridihttp://blog.tuquoque.com/post/2009/11/03/revolution-numerique-quatrieme-revolution

How information becomes knowledge

Simulations and Their Philosophical Implications

Arsenic and e-Health

How to see a masterpiece: Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, organ

Google Acquisitions and Investments

5th Annual Digital Assembly Conference

The Body as Interface

Victory at Bletchley Park Day

Project 10 to the 100th

2012 - The Alan Turing Year

The future of interfaces?

UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics

BBC - Digital Revolution (Working Title) - Digital Revolution

Two new elected fellows of the AISB

Computers and logic

Metalogic: An Introduction to the Metatheory of Standard First Order Logic

Web 2.0 contre Web sémantique : un point de vue philosophique

Patrick Peccatte La révolution numérique considérée comme une quatrième révolution, par Luciano Floridi
http://blog.tuquoque.com/post/2009/11/03/revolution-numerique-quatrieme-revolution