Disponible online: https://www.academia.edu/5206129/Philosophy_of_Information_An_Introduction
In April 2010, Bill Gates gave a talk at MIT in which he asked: ‘are the brightest minds working on the most important problems?’ Gates meant improving the lives of the poorest; improving education, health, and nutrition. We could easily add improving peaceful interactions, human rights, environmental conditions, living standards and so on. Philosophy of Information (PI) proponents think that Gates has a point – but this doesn’t mean we should all give up philosophy. Philosophy can be part of this project, because philosophy understood as conceptual design forges and refines the new ideas, theories, and perspectives that we need to understand and address these important problems that press us so urgently. Of course, this naturally invites us to wonder which ideas, theories, and perspectives philosophers should be designing now.
In our global information society, many crucial challenges are linked to information and communication technologies: the constant search for novel solutions and improvements demands, in turn, changing conceptual resources to understand and cope with them. Rapid technological development now pervades communication, education, work, entertainment, industrial production and business, healthcare, social relations and armed conflicts. There is a rich mine of philosophical work to do on the new concepts created right here, right now.
Philosophy “done informationally” has been around a long time, but PI as a discipline is quite new. PI takes age-old philosophical debates and engages them with up-to-the minute conceptual issues generated by our ever-changing, information-laden world. This alters the philosophical debates, and makes them interesting to many more people –including many philosophically- minded people who aren’t subscribing philosophers.
We, the authors, are young researchers who think of our work as part of PI, taking this engaged approach. We’re excited by it and want to teach it. Students are excited by it and want to study it. Writing a traditional textbook takes a while, and PI is moving quickly. A traditional textbook doesn’t seem like the right approach for the philosophy of the information age. So we got together to take a new approach, team-writing this electronic text to make it available more rapidly and openly.
Here, we introduce PI now. We cover core ideas, explaining how they relate both to traditional philosophy, and to the conceptual issues arising all over the place - such as in computer science, AI, natural and social sciences, as well as in popular culture. This is the first version, for 2013. Next year we’ll tell you about PI 2014.
We hope you love PI as much as we do! If so, let us have your feedback, and come back in 2014. Maybe some of you will ultimately join us as researchers. Either way, enjoy it. Yours, Patrick, Bert, Simon, Nir, Federico, Carson, Phyllis, Andrew, Eric, Giuseppe, Federica, Christoph, Mariarosaria, Matteo, Orlin, and Hector