The rise of inforgs in the infosphere jungle
Interesting essay on the future of our information world. Here are some highlights:
TidBITS: Peering into the Future of the Infosphere:
Using these concepts, my basic claim can now be formulated thus: digital information and communication technologies are radically reshaping the very nature of the infosphere, and therein lies the source of some of the most profound transformations and challenging problems that we shall experience in the near future, at least as far as technology is concerned. In the rest of this article, I mean to clarify and substantiate this simple claim by highlighting three fundamental trends in the reshaping of the infosphere and some of their significant implications.
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The upshot is that information and communication technologies are making humanity increasingly accountable, morally speaking, for the way the world is, will, and should be. That’s a huge change from times not so long ago when all-powerful gods were deemed responsible for every otherwise inexplicable event, and it forces us to accept ever more responsibility for our own actions in every sphere.
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This interactive digital environment will first gently invite us to understand the world as something “a-live” (artificially live), i.e. as comprising agents capable of interacting with us in various ways (shoes, for example, used to be “dead” artifacts, but you can now interact with the pair of Nike shoes you are wearing through your iPod). Such animation of the world will, paradoxically, make our outlook closer to that of pre-technological cultures which interpreted all aspects of nature as inhabited by animating spirits.
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The infosphere will not be a virtual environment supported by a genuinely real world; rather, it will be the world itself that will be increasingly interpreted and understood informationally, as part of the infosphere. At the end of this shift, the infosphere will have moved from being a way to refer to the space of information to being synonymous with Being. I suspect we shall find this sort of informational metaphysics increasingly easy to embrace.
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We have seen that we are probably the last generation to experience a clear difference between offline and online. The third transformation I wish to highlight concerns precisely the emergence of artificial and hybrid agents, i.e., partly artificial and partly human. Consider, for example, a family as a single agent, equipped with digital cameras, laptops, Palm OS handhelds, iPods, mobile phones, camcorders, wireless networks, digital TVs, DVDs, CD players, and so on.
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On the one hand, in the reshaped infosphere - progressively populated by artificial and hybrid agents, where there is no difference between processors and processed, online and offline - all interactions become equally digital. They are all interpretable as “read/write” activities, with “execute” being the remaining type of process. It is easy to predict that, in such an environment, the moral status and accountability of artificial agents will become an ever more challenging issue.
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What I have in mind is a quieter, less sensational, and yet crucial and profound change in our conception of what it means to be an agent. We are all becoming “connected informational organisms,” or what I’m calling “inforgs.” This is happening not through some fanciful transformation in our body, but, more seriously and realistically, through this radical reshaping of our environment and of ourselves.
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As digital immigrants like us are replaced by digital natives like our children, the latter will come to appreciate that there is no real difference between the infosphere and the physical world, only different levels of abstractions. And when the migration is complete, we shall increasingly feel deprived, excluded, handicapped, or poor to the point of paralysis and psychological trauma whenever we are disconnected from the infosphere, like fish out of water.
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On the one hand, the comment can now be expanded to the whole infosphere: the life and nature of our informational ecosystem depend entirely on us and will require all our creative attention and care. On the other hand, what we shall become as inforgs, and how we shall behave within the infosphere, will determine our success as the only biological species capable of creating a synthetic environment to which it then must adapt.
Marcus Aurelius once wrote that “Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.” I agree, but then I would add that this is why a philosophy of information that can look into today’s technology is our best chance to shape a better tomorrow.
