Ethical dimensions of information and knowledge societies

Recently, some messages strengthened their impact on society as a mix of incumbent tragedies (global warming, lack of food and water, pandemic crisis) and an ongoing full reshaping of society, a kind of imminent “new global order”. Furthermore, the “cancel culture” movement, and the negative impact of man on nature are pushing the most radical thinkers of the 21st-century to face the prospect of the actual extinction of Homo Sapiens, the endpoint of the Anthropocene, the faith of anti-humanism. Transhumanism, instead, glorifies scientific and technological progress, the supremacy of reason. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology will allow us to alter our brains and bodies that will exceed human limitations, general artificial intelligence will improve itself to think faster and deeper recursively. Both trunks of thoughts basically consider humans’ disappearance, on one side extinction on the other cyborg. Digital transformation is often seen as a significant partner helping to solve or at least mitigate our problems; digital technology is intertwined with almost all the life sectors, posing several ethical issues. We are increasingly leaving the analog, face to face, paper-based world to enter the intangible one, digitally mediated. Metaverse, if will succeed, will progressively create a clone of our environment, cyber-loneliness, one of the foreseeable risks, is a kind of addiction to this “parallel life” training users to shift from real to meta-life blurring the border between them, this may happen as much as the number of services and duties will be transferred on the other side of the Alice’s mirror. Meta-life can propose a “new normal” that once accepted in the meta-life might be accepted in the real life. The challenges for the upcoming years are the ways to sustain the human’s role and the inviolable right to freedom and personal privacy in an era of unlimited information gathering. Once again, the need to find a proper balance between humanities and technologies is omnipresent. Social sciences and humanities must establish a tight cooperation in designing or co-creation of cyber technologies always keeping humans in the focus. The WSIS can play a key role in this process.