Summary
An anthropological analysis shows two tendencies in today’s “information society”: (1) an increasing valorization of mind, information, and, more generally, immaterial elements, as opposed to body and matter; and (2) a strong tendency to replace everything human with artificial elements (for instance, retina implants, artificial limbs or hip prostheses). Even if these tendencies seem contradictory at first sight, in reality they are not: the mastering of information is their common denominator. Both directions were already present in Turing’s thought as early as the 1940s. The goal of this chapter is to throw a little light on the links between the man, the mathematician, and our present society, a goal that seems to be to create a predictable and infallible human being, in body as well as in mind. It should be noted that, according to Turing, human beings are not infallible in their essence.
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Cerqui, D. (2004). From Turing to the Information Society. In: Teuscher, C. (eds) Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05642-4_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05642-4_4
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