Simona Chiodo – författare

Predicting our future as individuals is central to the role of much emerging technology, from hiring algorithms that predict our professional success (or failure) to biomarkers that predict how long (or short) our healthy (or unhealthy) life will be. Yet, much in Western culture, from scripture to mythology to philosophy, suggests that knowing one’s future may not be in the subject’s best interests and might even lead to disaster. If predicting our future as individuals can be harmful as well as beneficial, why are we so willing to engage in so much prediction, from cradle to grave?

This book offers a philosophical answer, reflecting on seminal texts in Western culture to argue that predicting our future renders much of our existence the automated effect of various causes, which, in turn, helps to alleviate the existential burden of autonomously making sense of our lives in a more competitive, demanding, accelerated society. An exploration of our tendency in a technological era to engineer and so rid ourselves of that which has hitherto been our primary reason for being – making life plans for a successful future, while faced with epistemological and ethical uncertainties – Predicted Humans will appeal to scholars of philosophy and social theory with interests in questions of moral responsibility and meaning in an increasingly technological world.

Predicting our future as individuals is central to the role of much emerging technology, from hiring algorithms that predict our professional success (or failure) to biomarkers that predict how long (or short) our healthy (or unhealthy) life will be. Yet, much in Western culture, from scripture to mythology to philosophy, suggests that knowing one’s future may not be in the subject’s best interests and might even lead to disaster. If predicting our future as individuals can be harmful as well as beneficial, why are we so willing to engage in so much prediction, from cradle to grave?

This book offers a philosophical answer, reflecting on seminal texts in Western culture to argue that predicting our future renders much of our existence the automated effect of various causes, which, in turn, helps to alleviate the existential burden of autonomously making sense of our lives in a more competitive, demanding, accelerated society. An exploration of our tendency in a technological era to engineer and so rid ourselves of that which has hitherto been our primary reason for being – making life plans for a successful future, while faced with epistemological and ethical uncertainties – Predicted Humans will appeal to scholars of philosophy and social theory with interests in questions of moral responsibility and meaning in an increasingly technological world.

This book offers an extensive historical, philosophical and ethical discussion on the role of autonomous technologies, and their influence on human identity. By connecting those different perspectives, and analysing some practical case studies, it guides readers to dissect the relationship between machine and human autonomy, and machine and human identity. It analyses how the relationship between human and technology has been evolving in the last few centuries. Last, it aims at proposing an explanation on the reason/s why humans have been keen on developing their own autonomy’s perfect avatar.   

This book deals with the ethics of technology and addresses specific ethical problems related to some emerging technologies, mainly in the field of computer science (from machine learning models to extracting value from data to human–robot interaction). The contributions are authored mainly by scholars in ICT and other engineering fields who reflect on ethical and societal issues emerging from their own research activity. Thus, rather uniquely, the work overcomes the traditional divide between pure ethical theory that disregards what practitioners do and mere R&D practice that ignores what theorists conceptualize. Conversely, the reader is enabled to understand what ethics means when it is actually put into work by engineering researchers. The book arises from a joint program between MIT and Politecnico di Milano aimed at training early career researchers in addressing the ethical issues of technology and critically reflecting on the social impacts of the emerging, and even disruptive, technologies they are currently developing through their novel research. Overall, it aims at spreading the task of developing technologies that, from the beginning, are designed to be responsible for human life, society, and nature.

This volume collects the best papers presented at the 2019 Conference SIEV (Italian Society of Appraisal and Valuation) on the Science of Evaluation foundations, actuality, and prospects. The book consists of twenty-six papers and is organized into four parts: the first one collects reflections on the nature of the value judgement, on the truth of the evaluative statement, and on the authenticity its contents, the values; the next three present operational experiences in the three fields of natural, urban and cultural heritage where the knowledge of the value of the human space, supports decisions and policies, highlighting feature concerning: value and valuations in the dialectic between earth and the city; the value bearers between heuristic and normatively; the role of valuation for the complementarity of rules and creativity.

The book is being published in the midst of the new radical transformations of the equilibrium between social system and environment generated by the serious and unexpected crises of the third decade of this century. Reflections on the reality that fills evaluative statement with truth – the reality of values – is more topical than ever in a historic phase in which the role of democracies and the destiny of civil coexistence is called into question, claiming the order of unamendable values like truth, justice and beauty.