26 Mar 2013
Professor Luciano Floridi discusses the philosophy of information and information ethics at the 2013 European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s Innovation Forum. He outlines how history has experienced four major revolutions until the present: 1) the Copernican (humans are not immobile, at the centre of the universe); 2) the Darwinian (humans are not detached from the animal world); 3) the Freudian (humans are not rational creatures entirely transparent to themselves); and, finally, that of Alan Turing (humans are not disconnected agents, but informational organisms or ‘inforgs’, sharing with biological and engineered agents an environment that is basically informational — the info sphere). Floridi then proposes the concept of infra ethics, an ethical infrastructure that he argues facilitates ethically good decisions, choices, and behaviours. He concludes by endorsing the idea of a non-binding but yet authoritative instrument establishing these principals regarding human experimentation – the European Declaration on InfoEthics.