The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality

A book on how information and communication technologies are changing the way we understand ourselves and the world. Floridi argues that Turing began a fourth revolution in human self-understanding, after Copernicus displaced us from the centre of the universe, Darwin from the centre of the living world and Freud from full transparency to ourselves. We now find that we are not the only, or always the best, processors of information: we are 'inforgs', informational organisms living in an 'infosphere' shared with artificial agents. He calls the present age hyperhistory, a period in which societies depend on information technologies for their wellbeing, and uses the word 'onlife' for the blurring of online and offline life. Later chapters cover privacy, intelligence, agency, politics and the environment. On privacy he argues that personal information is part of who we are, so its theft is closer to kidnapping than to trespass. On intelligence he argues that machines succeed less by becoming clever than by our adapting, or 'enveloping', the world to suit them.

It gives a clear vocabulary for life in a digital society, from privacy to the environmental side of technology, and is a good introduction to the philosophy of information.