On the occasion of a recent lecture delivered at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, the philosopher Luciano Floridi concluded his presentation, “Digital Times: Toward the Construction of a Responsible Future,” with the following two questions: “Will the digital age expand or shrink our horizon of transcendence? Will the digital age make a fully immanent semantics possible (an atheist humanism)?” He explained further, “By this I mean the capacity to give sense and meaning to life entirely within human history, without flaws, without doubts, without alternatives, without saying, ‘But maybe. . . .’ The total, ironclad closure of an immanent semantics. Will the future be like this or not?”1 It is unclear to me whether Floridi sees this hypothetical outcome as a hell or a heaven.
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1. Luciano Floridi, “Tempi digitali: per la costruzione di un futuro responsabile” (lecture, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, September 30, 2021). Translation mine. Floridi makes a similar point in The Philosophy of Information (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).