“The Onlife Initiative: Being human in a hyperconnected era”

Biography
Nicole Dewandre is advisor for societal issues to the Director General of the Directorate General for Communications, Networks, Content and Technologies (DG CONNECT) at the European Commission. She studied applied physics engineering and economics at the University of Louvain, operations research at the University of California (Berkeley) and philosophy at the Free University of Brussels (ULB).

Abstract

The Onlife initiative is a collective thought exercise initiated by the European Commission. Under the chairmanship of Luciano Floridi, professor of Philosophy and UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics at the University of Hertfordshire; fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, 15 top-level EU academics1 have gathered to “think about what happens to us” with the digital transition and examine the consequences for policy making. I am the rapporteur of the exercise.

The pervasive changes induced by the ICT deployments fragilize established and almost naturalised referential frameworks on which policies are built. If policy making in the digital realm is to remain meaningful and relevant to societal concerns, it needs to revisit these naturalised referential frameworks, and adapt them to the new conditions in which we live and work: there is a need for “concept reengineering”, or instead for realising that recent philosophical investigations can be inspirational to grasp what is becoming commonsensical experience in a computational age.

In this talk, I will present Onlife’s Manifesto and the results of the initiative.