Robert Herritt

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Professor Luciano Floridi is an adviser to Google, but he could unofficially be called the search giant’s Philosopher-in-Chief. A metaphysician who turned his attention to information and privacy in order to address the needs of his age, Floridi is the academic thinker trying to help steer the company through uncharted, ethically choppy waters. From “Google’s Philosopher,” a Pacific-Standard profile by Robert Herritt:

“In 2010, a Spanish lawyer named Mario Costeja González appealed to Spain’s national Data Protection Agency to have an embarrassing auction notice for his repossessed home wiped from a newspaper website and de-indexed from Google’s search results. Because the financial matter had been cleared up years earlier, González argued, the fact that the information continued to accompany searches of his name amounted to a violation of privacy.

The Spanish authorities ruled that the search link should be deleted. In May 2014, the European Court of Justice upheld the Spanish complaint against Google. Since then, Google has received more than 140,000 de-linking requests. Handling these requests in a way that respects both the court and the company’s other commitments requires Google to confront an array of thorny questions. When, for instance, does the public’s right to information trump the personal right to privacy? Should media outlets be consulted in decisions over the de-indexing of news links? When is it in the public interest to deny right-to- be-forgotten requests?

Here’s where the dapper Italian philosopher comes in. Floridi is a professor of philosophy and the ethics of information, and he is the director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute. For more than a decade, he has distanced himself from the sort of conventional Anglo-American philosophy that occupied him for much of his early career. Driven by the idea that, as he put it to me, ‘philosophy should talk seamlessly to its time,’ he has set about developing a new approach to his discipline that he calls the philosophy of information. Floridi has described PI, as it is known, as his attempt to provide ‘a satisfactory way of dealing with the new ethical challenges posed by information and communication technologies.’ And, wouldn’t you know it, Google happens to be in the market for just that.

Although difficult to summarize, Floridi’s program comes down to this: For anyone who wants to address the problems raised by digital technologies, the best way to understand the world is to look at everything that exists—a country, a corporation, a billboard—as constituted fundamentally by information. By viewing reality in these terms, Floridi believes, one can simultaneously shed light on age-old debates and provide useful answers to contemporary problems.

Consider his take on what it means to be a person. For Floridi, you are your information, which comprises everything from data about the relations between particles in your body, to your life story, to your memories, beliefs, and genetic code. By itself, this is a novel answer to the perennial question of personal identity, which has preoccupied philosophers since at least Plato: What defines the self as a coherent entity over time and space? But Floridi’s view can also help us think precisely about the consequential questions that today preoccupy us at a very practical level.”

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Holy fuck, we have incredibly powerful computers in our shirt pockets!

That seemed unimaginable even recently. Yet we’re so consumed with the function and how we can manipulate it to flatter our egos that we often forget to be filled with wonder. There are political costs and other prices to pay for such bland, unquestioning acceptance. The opening of Robert Herritt’s New Atlantis essay, “When Technology Ceases to Amaze“: 

“Few of us stand in awe at every text message that materializes on our smartphone screen. This is a good thing, for the most part. One can hardly be expected to maintain a state of perpetual bewilderment at the technical marvels we carry around in our pockets. But had a fully charged iPhone fallen from the sky, say, sixty years ago, like the pristine Coke bottle discovered by an African tribe in the 1980 film The Gods Must Be Crazy, whoever came upon it would have been more than a little amazed. Indeed, the operations of the touch-sensitive slab would have seemed like a series of well-executed magic tricks — events that are manifestly real, but the causes of which are so effectively obscured as to produce the sensation that one is witnessing something impossible.

We would imagine that, lacking any knowledge of the causal antecedents of the device’s high-resolution animations, our mid-century iPhone wielder would have been compelled to ask how the mysterious object worked. He may have even devised a rudimentary theory, the same way a magician’s awestruck spectators grope for explanations after witnessing a seemingly impossible feat.

But is it ignorance of how the mysterious iPhone works that is the true source of this person’s wonder and curiosity? How many of us today have a better understanding of how our newest gadgets work than would our hypothetical friend from the 1950s? Yet it’s rare that we spend much time wondering what is going on within our pocket computers, or any of the various pieces of high technology we interact with every day.

Back in 2002, the authors of the National Academy of Engineering report Technically Speaking: Why All Americans Need to Know More About Technology observed that, ‘Americans use technology with a minimal comprehension of how or why it works or the implications of its use or even where it comes from.’ The danger, they argue, is that, given our lack of comprehension, we ‘are poorly equipped to recognize, let alone ponder or address, the challenges technology poses or the problems it could solve.’

It is certainly true that we might be missing out on some important conversations about the future of the Internet and the like. If the recent controversies over NSA data collection prove anything, it is that there are real political costs to ignoring basic technical questions about the devices we routinely use. But there are broader issues at play when it comes to our easy technological ignorance. Thanks to the abundance of sleek technologies that mediate our lives, the everyday environment of most Americans is filled with mystery.

We are used to telling ourselves the opposite: that, through the march of scientific progress and technical expertise, we’re continuously increasing our knowledge of our surroundings. This belief is surely true in some important respects. But our failure to be more probing about the inscrutable gadgets around us is perhaps the clearest evidence that our appetite for satisfying explanations, and our ability to discover them, may not be as strong as we think. This state of affairs should strike us as more than merely curious — especially since the skills required to seek out relevant information, evaluate competing theories, and make informed judgments about complex issues are only becoming more critical.”

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Evgeny Morozov, that contrarian philosopher of the Digital Age, was just interviewed by Robert Herritt at the Daily Beast. An excerpt about what Morozov believes is the near-term future of the Internet:

The Daily Beast:

You have often mentioned this pervasive idea of the Internet as eternal and sacrosanct. As someone who rejects that view, play futurist for a second: What kind of technologies could displace the Internet?

Evgeny Morozov:

I think that definitely the underlying network will probably stay for a while until we find other ways to interconnect our gadgets.

What I expect to see in the next five to seven years is the migration of Big Data and the algorithms that have been developed in the context of Facebook and in the context of Google, into the world at large — into the physical reality. I want to do my next book on the future of public space in the era of smart technologies. Because I think that, ultimately, all of that will break from the purely virtual connections into mediating how we interact with houses and buildings and public squares and shops.

What I do on Facebook will be integrated with what I do when I go to the store. It will be integrated with what I do when I drive my self-driving car. It will be integrated with what I print on my 3D printer, and so forth.”

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