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Peering into the Future of the Infosphere

Don O'Shea (apparently) - 07:12am Sep 27, 2006 PST
via email

Prof. Floridi describes the infosphere in terms of current concepts and structures. Nearly 50 years ago, a French Jesuit paleontologist, described an entity called the Noosphere. Teilhard expressed it in his usual elliptical manner:

"Understanding, discovery, invention. From the first awakening of his reflective consciousness, Man has been possessed by the demon of discovery; but until a very recent epoch this profound need remained latent, diffused and unorganised in the human mass. In fields embracing every aspect of physical matter, life and thought, the research workers are to be numbered in hundreds of thousands, and they no longer work in isolation but in teams endowed with penetrative powers that it seems nothing can withstand. Research, which until yesterday was a luxury pursuit, is in process of becoming a major, indeed the principal, function of humanity. And our proper biological course, in making use of what we call our leisure, is to devote it to a new kind of work on a higher plane: that is to say, to a general and concerted effort of vision. The Noosphere, in short, is a stupendous thinking machine." From Revue des Questions Scientifiques (Louvain) January 1947, pp. 7-35. Reprinted in ''The Future of Man,'' trans. by Norman Denny, Harper & Row, New York (1969), pp. 179-180.

Certainly, the extension of our thought and memories by electronic means are something that Chardin could hardly have forseen, but I hope the soulless isolation that could result from this synthetic environment does not play out. Chardin does not. He concludes that the formation of the noosphere will create an increase in freedom and cooperation. It certainly wish it will be.

My best regards,

Don O'Shea

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Dr. Donald C. O'Shea, Emerit. Prof.     Editor, Optical Engineering
School of Physics (N120)             Tel: 404-373-0035
Georgia Institute of Technology        Fax: 404-894-9958
Atlanta, GA 30332-0430         E-mail: doshea

prism.gatech.edu
_______________________________________________________________

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rwarner - Sep 28, 2006 11:42 am (#1 Total: 1)

Guest User

Posts: 1

Re: Peering into the Future of the Infosphere

What Luciano Floridi has written is a highly insightful essay on a
potential future for the infosphere. And unfortunately, what he has
appeared to have assumed incorrectly is that all information is correct.
In discussing the infosphere it's important to distinguish between data
and information. Information is data plus context. When he talks about
the data being generated at the Large Hadron Collider, none of that 5
petabytes/year will be information until it has been processed or
contextualized in some fashion. Data is normative in this sense, it just
is. However, as soon as someone prescribes a meaning in order to
transform data into information, it is possible that they have done this
incorrectly.

Innocent mistakes aside, many, many parties on the Internet are interested
in generating disinformation on purpose. Examples abound. Exxon utilized
a PR firm to create a phony personal docudrama on the dangers of the lies
about globalization. There is the now infamous LonelyGirl15 episode.
There are disinformation attacks on Wikipedia, which, incidentally, is one
of the only web sites to have taken truly unusual measures to insure that
its information is as correct as it can be.

Given these few examples, but the hundreds I imagine that come to
everyone's mind when they think about it, it becomes hard to accept some
of the "significant consequences" that Floridi discusses. The infosphere
will be frictionless? In a mechanical sense certainly, but the act of
sieving truth from the mass of partially correct or totally incorrect
information in the infosphere may not be easy or even something that can
be automated. Following that, his statement that we have no right to
ignore information seems even more odd. I have every right to ignore
information that I believe to be wrong. In fact, we have a right to
ignore information because we don't like it! And the idea that there will
be vast common knowledge is also then not likely.

It has always been helpful to me to think of truth as a kind of asymptote
towards which the quantity of information travels. A simple inductive
experiment performed many hundreds of times over gets you close to the
truth, but never quite absolutely there. The more information we can
gather on anything we want to know, the more possible it becomes to
triangulate the truth. In this sense, our rapidly growing infosphere will
provide us with that ability, but not naturally. We'll have to work for
it.

In the words of Tim Gunn, "Make it work!"
/russell warner
http://donarism.troped.com

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