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(revised on Medium) On the house left behind by a travelling God (series: notes to myself)

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There are some famous parables in the New Testament in which people travel, arrive, go away, or come back (for example, Matthew 25:1-13 on the ten virgins; Luke 15:11-32 on the prodigal son). But I have one in mind that has puzzled me for a long time: Matthew 25:14-15 (on the talents), about the man, probably representing God, who is “going on a journey” (ἀποδημῶν) and “comes back after a long time” (πολὺν χρόνον).  The word ἀποδημῶν means “about to go on a journey”, and it is the same word used in another parable, when God goes away, again (Matthew 21:33-46). In both cases, he leaves the house for reasons that are not provided. Why does he have to go? Can he not stay? It seems that more pressing business calls him elsewhere. Something or someone is more important than us, who live in the house. An emergency? Or perhaps just a test? Maybe he just wants to see what the mice do when the cat is away. Whatever the motives, there is a journey, a time before and after his presence, and t...
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The Loebner Prize from a judge's perspective

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This year, for the first time in its history, the Loebner Prize competition was held in England, at the University of Reading to be precise. It was organised by Kevin Warwick and Huma Shah. Independently of whether Turing might have been pleased (he was not well treated in this country, recall?), there was a satisfying sense of “coming home” of the Turing Test (henceforth TT ). Expectations were high, and they very highly advertised too. The meeting was perfectly organised. Having been invited to play the role of a judge, together with several other colleagues, including two members of the IEG , Mariarosaria Taddeo and Matteo Turilli ( here are their pictures and Rosaria's interview ) , I enjoyed the opportunity to see from close-up the machinery and the TT . It was intriguing and great fun. Because there were interviews with the BBC and other things going on, and because we were also supposed to take part in the parallel AISB Symposium on the TT , I had time to test only...
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Mind the app - considerations on the ethical risks of COVID-19 apps

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[22 April update: at the Digital Ethics Lab (OII, University of Oxford) we have elaborated a list of 16 questions to check whether an app is ethically justifiable, the full article, open access, is available here ] There is a lot of talk about apps to deal with the pandemic . Some of the best solutions use the Bluetooth connection of mobile phones to determine the contact between people and therefore the probability of contagion. In theory, it may seem simple. In practice, there are several ethical problems, not only legal and  technical ones . To understand them, it is useful to distinguish between the validation and the verification of a system.  The validation of a system answers the question: "are we building the right system?". The answer is no if the app is illegal,  for example, the use of an app in the EU must comply with the GDPR; mind that this is necessary but not sufficient to make the app also ethically acceptable, see below; is unnecessar...
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Between a rock and a hard place: Elon Musk's open letter and the Italian ban of Chat-GPT

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Interview by Adele Sarno for HuffPost, the Italian original is here The following English translation is provided by Google, apologies for any imprecision. Luciano Floridi, the digital philosopher, works between Oxford and Bologna, from next summer, he will leave Oxford to direct the Center for Digital Ethics at Yale. He has received the highest honour granted by the Italian Republic: Cavaliere di Gran Croce. According to the Elsevier Scopus database, he is the most cited living philosopher in the world. If today we talk about the "philosophy of information", it is thanks to him, who for 30 years, studied the connections between philosophy and the digital world. Professor Floridi, ChatGPT has been at the centre of the debate, especially these days. Elon Musk and a thousand other experts have written a letter asking for its development to be stopped for six months. In Italy, on the other hand, the privacy guarantor has decided to stop for 20 days until it complies with the pr...
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On the importance of being pedantic (series: notes to myself)

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They say that to call someone pedantic is an insult. I'm not so sure. True, someone pedantic is obsessed with minor details, small errors, or tiny imperfections. And a pedantic is also someone who cares too much about all such things not to let you know about them, advising or correcting, disagreeing or disapproving. And yes, if you are a pedant, you are more than just occasionally pedantic. This can happen to anybody, the excessive emphasis on some narrow or boring detail being a tendency we all share when it comes to matters about which we care very much. But if you are a pedant, being pedantic is your daily stance, your intrinsic nature, your way of living. You are always, consistently, reliably, systematically pedantic, from the moment you wake up, about the exact place where the slippers should be next to your bed, all the way to the moment you go to sleep, and the exact place where the phone should be placed to recharge. If you are a true pedant, no detail is too trivial, no ...
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On the art of biting one's own tongue (series: notes to myself)

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The art of biting one's own tongue consists in the ability not to engage when someone says something unpleasant, untrue, malicious, or abusive about you. Instead of answering a biased question, arguing against a ludicrous opinion, complaining about an abusive message, correcting a meaningless error, countering a fallacy, explaining a patent mistake, objecting to a groundless criticism, rectifying a willful misrepresentation, rejecting an insinuation, responding to a provocation, retorting to a nasty remark, replying to an offensive allegation, … in short, instead of engaging with your mindless interlocutors you simply ignore them and do absolutely nothing, not even acknowledging that you might have received their communication, not even sharing a “no comment”, just silence. As far as they know, you might have never got the email, read the tweet or the Facebook comment, seen the Instagram picture. If you bite your own tongue appropriately, for them their communication might have nev...
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(revised on Medium) On being immortal (series: notes to myself)

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I grew up with two conceptions of immortality in my mind. It took me a while to realise that they shaped my behaviours and my choices. My identity. Neither turned out to be credible. But both were useful, for they taught me a lesson. As a Catholic, I was brought up believing in a dream. I was immortal. Not backward, for I was born. But forward, because I would not die. Actually, this is not the dream, for it may be the worst of all nightmares. It is the second part that turned it into the best deal ever. I was taught, since I can remember, that if I behaved decently and repented about the rest, I was going to live a life of heavenly bliss forever, and ultimately resurrect, just the way I was (or even better), and join all the people I had ever loved and indeed billions more.  As a kid, I worried, not deeply yet frequently, about eternal damnation, the nasty side of being immortal. Speak of side effects! Better be annihilated, I calculated, than suffer horribly forever. And sometime...
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Two books for Oxford University Press

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I have now completed the two projects for Oxford University Press. One is a small book, entitled Information , written for OUP popular series Very Short Introductions . The other is the book I had been writing for ten year: The Philosophy of Information . It will also be published by OUP. Next project: the other book that complements PoI : Information Ethics . Hopefully it will not take me another decade.
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Review of Information A Very Short Introduction

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Information: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Paperback) Review, by Lee J. Whittington Sat in a small office for a seminar on modal logic, my then logic tutor told me that "if you read something once and do not understand, it is your fault. If you read something twice and do not understand, it is the authors fault". This is something to be kept in mind when reading this book. The title should not fool the reader. This is not "Information for Dummies". The book can be technical and difficult requiring occasional reflective breaks. Unlike some of the other VSI series, to understand the book properly will take more than three or four hours. However, this is where Prof. Floridi comes into his own. Using many elegant metaphors, analogies and examples, Floridi provides some of the intuitive first steps required to understand what would be baffling concepts. My favourite metaphor is that used for understanding quantum superposition, whereby we...
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