Short Bio:

Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Governing Body Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He is also Adjunct Professor, Department of Economics, American University, Washington D.C. Among his recognitions, he has been awarded the Cátedras de Excelencia Prize by the University Carlos III of Madrid (2014-15), was the UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics and Gauss Professor of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. He is a recipient of the APA's Barwise Prize, the IACAP's Covey Award, and the INSEIT's Weizenbaum Award. He is an AISB and BCS Fellow, Editor in Chief of Philosophy & Technology and of the Synthese Library. In 2012, he was Chairman of EU Commission's "Onlife Initiative". His most recent books are: The Fourth Revolution - How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (Oxford University Press, 2014), The Ethics of Information (Oxford University Press, 2013), The Philosophy of Information (Oxford University Press, 2011), The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics (editor, Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Information: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Website: http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/

Coordination, Semantics, and Autonomy

The lecture is divided into four parts. In the first part, I offer a brief and simple introduction to four well-known senses in which different scientific fields speak of complexity, namely state complexity, Kolmogorov complexity, computational complexity, and programming complexity. I then suggest an intuitive way in which they can all be linked in a conceptual, unified view. Against this background, in the second part, I outline a new concept of complexity, which I shall call coordination complexity. This completes the unified view. I then argue, in the third part, that the semantic web helps us dealing with problems with increasingly high degree of coordination complexity, which require the mobilisation of whole systems to be tackled. In the last and concluding part, I highlight one of the consequences of the resolution of problems with high degree of coordination complexity: the predictability and manipulability of autonomous choices.