SDF

Visionary :
 - Luciano FLORIDI [Professor of Philosophy & UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics, University of Hertfordshire / Fellow, St Cross College, Oxford University]

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become environmental forces, which are creating and shaping our reality by "enveloping" the world (in robotics, an envelope is the three-dimensional space that defines the boundaries reachable by the robot).
Consider a dishwasher. We do not build robots that wash dishes like us; we envelop microenvironments around simple robots to fit and exploit at best their limited capacities and still deliver the desired output.
Nowadays, enveloping is an ordinary, escalating phenomenon, which pervades any aspect of reality. Some of the most pressing challenges concerning our societies and coexistence arise within highly enveloped environments in which all relevant data available are machine-readable, and decisions as well as actions may be taken automatically by applications that can execute commands and output the corresponding procedures in fractions of a second.
How can we ensure that we shall reap the benefits of enveloping for the future of our information society? And what are the risks implicit in transforming the world into a progressively ICT-friendly environment?