Gérald Santucci.....These ‘tectonic mental shifts’ are of course interdependent subparts of the whole phenomenon of hyperconnectivity – “the instant availability of people for communication anywhere and anytime” (Anabel QUAN-HAASE & Barry WELLMAN.). Such hyperconnectivity has major ethical implications as it may eventually lead to more loneliness or on the contrary more interdependence. I argued elsewhere that the recent COVID-19 pandemic had shown that the future of humanity lied in altruism and empathy, not in egoism and distance. This is even truer in the hyperconnectivity era where the very concept of humanness is questioned – the ‘self’ can remain the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ the ‘other’ or, in a new paradigm, as argued by Nicole DEWANDRE building on the work of Hannah ARENDT, the ‘self’ becomes plural (i.e. equal, unique and relational) and the ‘other’ is a self.
Therefore, what we should be aware of is that the ethics of IoT is not only a matter of compliance with and enforcement of existing regulations, or a new application of the classical problems of privacy and security, even if these elements are extremely important, it is primarily a collective reflection on the future of humanity and Sarah SPIEKERMANN’s Idea of Man in a context where hyperconnectivity among human beings and with their artefacts raises a new challenge to the concept of human identity.
After the Saint, the Hero, the Wise Man, the Honnête Homme, and now the Hyperconnected Human, what role model of human is to emerge?
Is there anything between Clyne’s Cyborg and Nietzsche’s Superman?
This is probably the biggest challenge to which our generation shall have to respond.