7:00 p.m., Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Luciano Floridi, UNESCO Chair of Information and Computer Ethics, University of Hertfordshire, Research Fellow of Wolfson College

The post-Westphalian Nation State developed by becoming more and more an Information Society. However, in so doing, it progressively made itself less and less the main information agent, because what made the Nation State possible and then predominant as a historical driving force in human politics, namely Information and Computing Technology, is also what is now making it less central in the social, political and economic life of humanity across the world. Geo-politics is now global and increasingly non-territorial, but the Nation State still defines its identity and political legitimacy in terms of a sovereign territorial unit such as a country. This tension calls for a serious exercise in conceptual re-engineering: how should new informational multi-agent systems (MAS) be designed in such a way as to take full advantage of the socio-political progress made so far, while being able to deal successfully with the new global challenges (from the environment to the financial markets) that are undermining the legacy of that very progress? This lecture shall defend an answer to this question in terms of a design of political MAS based on principles borrowed from information ethics.