Luciano Floridi

Agora

Luciano Floridi

b. 1964

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Information is a basic feature of reality, and since we now live in an “infosphere”, we need a new ethics for the digital world.

Placement

Analytic Philosophy · Southern Europe · Science, Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics

Main proponent of the philosophy of information as a field, now at Yale: after Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, the “fourth revolution” of Turing makes us informational organisms in an “infosphere” that needs its own ethics.

Key ideas

Philosophy of information
Infosphere and the fourth revolution
Levels of abstraction
Digital and AI ethics

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Influence

Influenced by 2

Immanuel Kant

influenced by
Floridi gave his constructionism a Kantian shape: things in themselves remain unknowable, and we know systems through models at chosen levels of abstraction (The Philosophy of Information, 2011). L. Floridi, “The Method of Levels of Abstraction”, Minds and Machines 18 (2008); The Philosophy of Information (2011)
Evidence: AI draft
Immanuel Kant › 1724–1804
Alan Turing

influenced by
Floridi called Turing’s the fourth revolution after Copernicus, Darwin and Freud: we are informational organisms (‘inforgs’) among other intelligent agents (The Fourth Revolution, 2014). L. Floridi, The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality (2014); The Philosophy of Information (2011)
Evidence: AI draft
Alan Turing › 1912–1954

Criticism

Criticizes 1

Plato

criticised
Floridi argued that the ‘user’s knowledge’ tradition inherited from Plato should be complemented, if not replaced, by constructionism: knowing as making and modelling (‘A Defence of Constructionism’, 2011). L. Floridi, “A Defence of Constructionism: Philosophy as Conceptual Engineering”, Metaphilosophy 42 (2011), 282–304; The Logic of Information (2019); Plato, Republic X, 601c–602a
Evidence: AI draft
Plato › 428–348 BCE

Position

Floridi established the philosophy of information as a field in its own right. Information, he argues, is as basic a concept for our age as being, knowledge or substance were for earlier philosophy, and his “informational structural realism” holds that reality is best understood as a structure of informational objects. Philosophy works with “levels of abstraction”, explicit choices of the variables through which a system is described, and it is less the representation of a given world than “conceptual design”, closer to the knowledge of the maker than to that of the observer. “The Fourth Revolution” places digital technology in a series of blows to human self-importance: after Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, Turing showed that we are not the only intelligent agents, and we now live as “inforgs”, informational organisms, in an “infosphere” where the line between online and offline has dissolved into “onlife”. His information ethics gives every existing thing, as an informational entity, a minimal moral standing and counts the destruction or impoverishment of the infosphere as an evil. In AI ethics he has worked on principles for a “good AI society” and on its regulation in Europe.

Life & context

Luciano Floridi (born 1964 in Rome) studied philosophy at Sapienza University of Rome and took his doctorate at the University of Warwick in 1990 under Susan Haack. He spent many years at Oxford, first at Wolfson College and from 2013 as professor of philosophy and ethics of information at the Oxford Internet Institute, where he directed the Digital Ethics Lab; he also taught at Bari and Hertfordshire and held a UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics. In 2023 he moved to Yale University as founding director of its Digital Ethics Center. He is also professor of sociology of culture and communication at the University of Bologna and has advised governments and companies on digital ethics.