THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION “NEW NORMAL”

To have a clear vision of the “new reality” and its trend, it is neces- sary to consider the technological evolution together with some relevant events and the impacts that these aspects have had and will have on society, then carrying out a “future back casting” exercise. Recently, some messages have strengthened their impact on society as a mix of incumbent tragedies and an ongoing full reshaping of soci- ety, a kind of imminent “new global order”. On the one hand, the glob- al warming, climate change, the ozone hole, lack of food and water, the pandemic crisis and more have had a profound impact on society, generating a widespread feeling of risk for the survival of humanity. The “cancel culture” movement, and the negative impact of man on nature are pushing the most radical thinkers of the twentieth century to stop facing the prospect of the actual extinction of Homo Sapiens. This perspective, as the endpoint of the Anthropocene, the faith of an- ti-humanism, begins not with a political programme but with a phil- osophical idea. The flip side, Transhumanism glorifies some of the same things that anti-humanism decries – scientific and technologi- cal progress, the supremacy of reason. Some transhumanists believe that genetic engineering and nanotechnology will allow us to alter our brains and bodies so profoundly that we will escape human limita- tions such as mortality and confinement to a physical body. Others are adamant that general artificial intelligence design will improve itself to think faster and deeper, then the improved version would improve itself, and so on, exponentially. Both trunks of thoughts basically con- sider humans’ disappearance, on the one side extinction, on the other cyborg. There are some key events that have characterised the recent period, one of these is the so-called digital transformation considered the natu- ral evolution of the current society in the light of a pervasive technology, like digital technology. Digital technology is intertwined with almost all the life sectors. Since the dawn of digital technology, the number of applications and so- lutions based on such technology had a surprising rate of growth. Tran- sistors, originally conceived to fight against deafness, were the sparkling light of several new devices, followed by integrated circuits. Computers became ten times smaller and powerful, being ten times cheaper. Nowa- days there is no field of human knowledge that does not take advan- tage or is not based on digital: communication, education, government, health, energy, mobility, etc. The full settlement of such pervasive technology is termed digi- tal transformation (DT or DX); governments, international organisa- tions, private companies are all together promoting and facilitating this switch from analogue to digital. We are increasingly leaving the analogue, face to face, paper-based world to enter the intangible digi- tal mediated one. Many years ago, in the 1980s, a multidisciplinary panel was held to discuss the ontological aspects of digital to approach this sector properly. The outcomes were that digital objects represent a completely new class of objects they give the opportunity to be here and there, create clones perfectly equal to originals, shared among an unlimited number of owners, “immortal” in theory and more. Is it all gold that glitters?