Strolling through informatics #23 – Toward a humanistic view of the digital

previous #22 ––– next #24

by Enrico Nardelli

(versione italiana qua)

Teaching the principles of informatics should begin from the early years of school. This is a position that the European coalition Informatics for All, which I founded together with other European colleagues when I was president of Informatics Europe, has advocated for many years. Recently, this request was adopted by the Council of the European Union, with the Recommendation of November 23, 2023, which we discussed precisely in the introductory episode to this journey.

The fundamental notion that an information system operates without any understanding, on the part of the system itself, of what is being processed and how it is being processed, must accompany the entire educational process. Furthermore, it should always go hand in hand with the reflection that the process of modeling reality in terms of digital data and processing it through algorithms is a human activity and, as such, can be influenced by bias and ignorance, without the individual being aware of it. Only in this way, in fact, does it become possible to understand that any choice, from the initial ones regarding which elements to represent and how to represent them, to those that determine the rules of the processing itself, is the result of a human decision-making process and is therefore devoid of that objectivity that is too often associated with algorithmic decision-making processes.

At the scientific level, in May 2019, a movement was born – also with the contribution of the Author – that produced the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism , which reminds us how digital technologies «are undermining society and questioning our understanding of what it means to be human». The Manifesto reminds us that the stakes are high and the goal of building a just and democratic society where people are at the center of technological progress is a challenge to be faced with determination and creativity.

Like all technologies, digital ones do not emerge from nothing. They are shaped by implicit and explicit choices and, therefore, incorporate a set of values and interests related to our world. The teaching of informatics and reflection on its influence on society must therefore begin as early as possible. Students should learn to combine informatics skills with awareness of the ethical and social issues at stake.

The Manifesto reaffirms the importance of developing and designing digital technologies based on human values and needs such as: democracy, inclusion, respect for privacy, freedom of expression, valuing diversity, equality and equity, transparency.

It also emphasizes the importance of raising awareness about the fact that relevant decisions concerning human beings must always be made by people and not by algorithms.

This last point is of the utmost importance. In fact, as Giuseppe Longo (a distinguished Italian informatician who has been working in France for many years) observed, the fundamental distinction introduced by Alan Turing between hardware and software, when applied to living beings and society, is a «computational madness».

First, because in the biological world there is no such distinction between hardware and software. DNA, the code of life, constitutes its own hardware. The rewriting of representations that occurs in digital machines solely through software is in this sense different from the transcription from DNA to RNA that occurs in biology.

Second, because fluctuations are completely absent in the discrete world in which Turing machines operate, while they play an essential role in the complex dynamic systems that surround us. As first noted by the great French mathematician Henri Poincaré, this can result in the unpredictability of the evolution of such systems, even if the laws that characterize them are defined deterministically.

Third, because any software is only able to represent an abstraction of a real phenomenon. While this abstraction can provide valuable insights into its dynamics, considering the representation as the phenomenon itself is as wrong as confusing the map with the territory.

And, finally, digital systems, once placed in the same starting conditions within the same context, will identically calculate the same result, even for those complex systems where (as Poincaré demonstrated) this is physically absurd. «Computer networks and databases, if considered as the ultimate instrument of knowledge or as an image of the world» writes Longo «live in the nightmare of exact knowledge through pure counting, of unshakeable certainty through exact iteration, and of a "final solution" to all scientific problems».

From a mathematical-physical point of view, this attitude is fallacious, for at least a couple of reasons.

First, because our behaviors occur in a continuous space and, as Poincaré had first intuited, in the approximation that every measurement makes with respect to a continuous value lies the unpredictability of physical phenomena .

Second, the number of "dimensions" through which we can "measure" our behavior is presumably infinite. In other words, a specific behavior of ours might need an infinite number of values to be represented (each of which would still be subject to the approximation previously described). It follows, therefore, that no real digital device, which is finite, could physically represent such an infinite quantity of values, thus introducing a second type of approximation.

The social consequences of this cultural approach can, however, be truly terrifying, as David Bowie said in the interview mentioned in the previous post. This tendency, supported by an increasingly pervasive collection of data related to our activities that is increasingly beyond our control, leads to reducing human beings to a series of data, pushing them to act as automatic mechanisms that always follow the same behavioral patterns. It brings to mind the famous film "The Truman Show," whose protagonist was the unwitting puppet of a script written by others.

The attentive reader will certainly not miss the dangers in terms of social control that hide behind taking for granted this mechanistic vision of human society, which reduces the infinite and nuanced complexity of our experiences to a finite set of distinct bits.

[[The posts in this series are based on the Author's book (in Italian) La rivoluzione informatica: conoscenza, consapevolezza e potere nella società digitale, (= The Informatics Revolution: Knowledge, Awareness and Power in the Digital Society) to which readers are referred for further reading]].

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The original version (in italian) has been published by "Osservatorio sullo Stato digitale" (= Observatory on Digital State) of IRPA - Istituto di Ricerche sulla Pubblica Amministrazione (= Research Institute on Public Administration) on 12 March 2025.