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Presentation: Luciano Floridi – Happiness in an Onlife World

Thijs Pepping
April 25, 2018

Our current research topic is called “Digital Happiness” and we’re exploring new ideas about how companies should interact with their clients and employees. This time we want to share the idea and vision from Luciano Floridi: ‘Happiness in an Onlife World. Floridi shared his vision with us and our clients during our event In Pursuit of Digital Happiness in Brussels on November 9-10 2017.

Professor Luciano Floridi on Digital Happiness: “It is the capability of digital technology to couple and decouple that makes digital so special. To bundle and unbundle, to cut and paste, to glue and unglue, that is the characteristic that sets digital apart from any other technology”. It makes sense. Location and presence, for instance, are decoupled thanks to digital technology. At the same time, producers and consumers are coupled in “prosumers”: a person who consumes and produces content through (social) media. Decoupling reality from virtuality results in Virtual Reality, while coupling both results in Augmented or Mixed Reality. Or think of the disruption resulting from decoupling asset usage and ownership, as demonstrated by Spotify, the broader sharing economy, and “as a service” business models. Floridi’s take on Digital Happiness is thorough, sophisticated and mind-baffling, if you like it, consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.. Enjoy!
  About Luciano Floridi Luciano Floridi is the OII’s Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he is also the Director of the Digital Ethics Lab of the Oxford Internet Institute. Still in Oxford, he is Distinguished Research Fellow of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics of the Faculty of Philosophy, and Research Associate and Fellow in Information Policy of the Department of Computer Science. Outside Oxford, he is Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute (the national institute for data science) and Chair of its Data Ethics Group; and Adjunct Professor (“Distinguished Scholar in Residence”) of the Department of Economics, American University, Washington D.C. His research concerns primarily Information and Computer Ethics (aka Digital Ethics), the Philosophy of Information, and the Philosophy of Technology. Other research interests include Epistemology, Philosophy of Logic, and the History and Philosophy of Scepticism.   About the In Pursuit of Digital Happiness events Two recent deep dives with a group of  IT Executives gave us more insights in how our current research topic “Digital Happiness” is going to evolve. We’ll share the videos recorded at these meetings that we’ve organized in the coming months. Both in the US (Chicago) and Europe (Brussels) business executives, media experts and academia shared their views on the massive transformative impact of digital technologies. The fundamentals on which the program In Pursuit of Digital Happiness was based are simple: the technological and financial limitations of digital progress have been dealt with. The real question to answer for businesses to be successful in the society that emerges is, “What do we desire?” Happiness, in the broad definition by the school of positive psychology – from fun and the daily pleasure to getting in a state of flow, and the rewarding feeling of living a meaningful life and doing meaningful things – guided the discussions about the social desirability.  

About the author

Trend Analyst VINT | Netherlands
Thijs Pepping is a humanistic trend analyst in the field of new technologies. He is part of the think tank within SogetiLabs and in his work he continuously wonders and analyses what the impact of New Technologies is on our lives, organizations and society. He specialized in Humanistic Counselling and Education at the University of Humanistics in Utrecht and worked for five years with autistic chi

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