The volume represents an attempt to provide an up-to-date picture of the scientific and philosophical debate that is accompanying the development of the digital revolution.
On the one hand, pervasive technological innovations and whose prodigiously beneficial effects are emphasized daily by the media, on the other hand the growing and widespread concerns aroused in public opinion and in governments by the opaque methods of use of these technologies that take hold even before the actual impact on human life can be examined.
A tension between pro-digital fanaticism and techno-skepticism that so far has made the victim first of all the possibility of discussing it a priori and not always a posteriori, that is, before things happen and not after.
This revolution, emblematically symbolised by Artificial Intelligence, is producing unprecedented contradictions, here defined antinomies, which are the cause of a growing collective disorientation
and thorny philosophical dilemmas. In all of them the advent of a new dimension of human living, the infosphere, which redefines the identities, now plural and digital, of each individual.
A world in which people participate as virtual characters, or avatars, and the Cartesian “cogito ergo sum”, an ancient ontological proof of existence for Homo Sapiens Sapiens, is replaced by another ontology, that of Homo Sapiens Digitans that can be summarized in a new axiom: digito ergo sum.
Hence the need for a new philosophical anthropology that can guide us towards this future full of questions. A Glossary at the end of the volume, with the explanation of some key terms, accompanies
the reader on the journey.
