A look into the future: Discuss the wearable device and how it will change the future

The Information Society

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A look into the future

impact of ICT on our lives
Luciano Floridi
Dipartimento di Scienze Filosofiche, Università degli Studi di Bari; Faculty of Philosophy and
A 1995 paper, published in this journal, in which I
predicted what sort of transformations and problems were likely to affect the development of the
Internet and our system of organised knowledge in the medium term. In this second attempt, I
look at the future developments of Information and Communication Technologies and try to
guess what their impact on our lives will be. The forecast is that, in information societies, the
threshold between online and offline will soon disappear, and that once there won’t be any
difference, we shall become not cyborgs but rather inforgs, i.e. connected informational
organisms.

The global infosphere or how information is becoming our ecosystem
During the last decade or so, we have become accustomed to conceptualising our life online as a
mixture between an evolutionary adaptation of human agents to a digital environment, and a
form of post-modern, neo-colonization of the latter by the former. This is probably a mistake.
ICTs are as much re-ontologising our world as they are creating new realities. The threshold
between here (analogue, carbon-based, off-line) and there (digital, silicon-based, online) is fast
becoming blurred, but this is as much to the advantage of the latter as it is of the former.
Adapting Horace’s famous phrase, “captive cyberspace is conquering its victor”.
The digital is spilling over into the analogue and merging with it. This recent
phenomenon is variously known as “Ubiquitous Computing”, “Ambient Intelligence”, “The
Internet of Things” (ITU report, November 2005 www.itu.int/internetofthings) or “Webaugmented
things”. It is or will soon be the next stage in the digital revolution.
Basically, the increasing digital re-ontologization of artefacts and of whole (social)
environments suggests that soon it will be difficult to understand what life was like in predigital
times (to someone who was born in 2000 the world will always have been wireless, for example)
and, in the near future, the very distinction between online and offline will become blurred and
then disappear. To put it dramatically, the infosphere is progressively absorbing any other space.
Let me explain.