Hyper History and Cyber War - Computerphile 

Prof. Lociano Floridi has this same way of speaking as Prof. Edward Frenkel, I don't know I just love that quite, serious and charismatic way of explanation.

His insight and understanding of the connection between people and technology is fascinating. This vid clearly shows why he's a professor.

I like how he said "You must take this into consideration in case you think that science fiction has something to tell us about the future of us." Many things that were once science fiction are now reality. A man on the moon? Pfft, that's not possibl- oh, wait. 12 people have walked on the moon. Portable communication devices that are not tethered to some giant transmitter? Cell phones. Better yet, portable scanning and computing devices that can be held in the hand and can process ridiculous amounts of information (tricorders)? Again, cell phones. My Galaxy S4 has more processing power and sensors than many satellites still in use today. I'm not going to sit here and tell everyone that "SKYNET IS REAL" or that "the Cylons are going to try to wipe out humanity!" However, these are not exactly outside of the realm of possibilities. Probable? Not really. Possible? Extremely so. ----------------- That said, that point was my ONLY problem with this video. It was very informative and entertaining. Keep it up, Computerphile!

Interesting video. Also, I really appreciate the fact that you don't have pre-roll ads. That's pretty much the only way I can endure not enabling my Ad-blocker.

Thanks for the feedback - the computerphile 'official' paper is green & white dot matrix printer paper rather than brown paper! - Glad you enjoyed what the professor had to say :) >Sean

you could look at it from a historian/ethics standpoint. back during history, History was written by the winner. the one who got to decide. now, history can be observed and taken down on the spot by nearly everyone with the proper device, noting "hyper history"

When are you uploading more videos from Professor Luciano Floridi?

this is your first video on this channel that didnt seem dumbed down. i like it and i like the guy who is talking too..

That was such a fantastic last line. Bravo. I am loving these!

Can't wait for new Computerphile videos.

As someone who studied both IT and history I found this video fascinating. I would love to see more on the subject

I want more of him. He seems REALLY competent.

This was really interesting and enlightening! You are doing a great job with this channel, spanning from the very technical to the highly philosophical. Keep it up Brady & co.!

A really fascinating viewpoint on how our civilisation is developing, hoping to see more of this guy!

The quality of this video was really good! I mean how it was shot etc. Much better than usual keep it up.

Wow. More of this guy. The information was interesting, and he oozes professionalism.

I'd love to hear more from Prof. Floridi!

I like this guy and hope to see more of him on this channel.

I didn't really get a definition of it from the video either. My best guess would be that ease of access to technology allows us to record far more history than was ever possible in the past. So, being inundated with so much data, we're creating "hyper" history.

How about a nice game of chess?

Best video on this channel yet. I'm still waiting on the videos dedicated to hardware, though. When?

Such a mellifluous voice; I could listen to him forever.

Good to see someone from the University of Hertfordshire on here, after all, it has one of the oldest computer science departments in the country.

May we have another video about the history of computers? Not only Babbage and Turing but also N.Wiener and Neumann, that would be great!

Great video, never knew the meaning behind prehistoric. I also really like the concept of technology triple threat.

Would be nice to hear more about the pessimistic scenarios and why it is unlikely to happen. What does prof. Floridi thinking about intelligence explosion and singularity?

Yes. More Prof Floridi please.

Wow. I love this channel.

I regularly access information from over 20 years ago. I enjoy early 90's video games. I still have access to very old IRC chats and some of the earliest discussion boards on the internet. If you look around, you can find usenet posts from the early 80's. THIRTY YEARS AGO! :D A single disk may be prone to fail within 15 years, but information on the internet is stored redundantly in many banks of such disks. We are in an era where information often outlives the media on which it is stored.

can't believe you actually got Luciano Floridi in your video!

I compare them all the time, but it is usually favorably. I did say at the beginning that if Numberphile were like this then they'd be talking about slide rules and compasses instead of math, lol. But now that there have been more videos it is balancing out.

Think we are talking Ed Snowden here! Great video, I always like hearing prof of philosophy, the logic thought process. More.

Yes, I agree with what you say. My concern is whether the addition of a "hyperhistory" is just a complication. After more thought, I've come to the conclusion that the division between the use of computer systems to autonomously transfer and react to information is sufficient to warrant a new period. As history removed the information from the person, and allowed it to be carried by any, "hyperhistory" removes the need for it to be carried, or seen by man, and the impact of each is significant.

Kind of interesting that in the future a war could just be between a group of people with no cause, fighting an opponent as large as a country just for the sake of information, or control over one seemingly small aspect of life. Puts a chill through the spine as warfare may change forever.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us. Please ignore the haters.

I can't help but be fond of his view of history, but it seems rather simplistic and prescriptive. The basis that he uses for 'hyper-history,' that of the invention of written speech totally ignores the rich oral culture of 'prehistorical' civilisation. Is he saying that those who composed the Illiad, or pre-islamic poetry, for example, had no sense of the past?

I love this guys handwriting.

The Dot Matrix paper I had growing up was just white on both sides (and didn't have the numbers on them) so the stuff he was using reminded me of my accounting classes :P I'll try to shake it off :)

I like this programmatic approach to classifying human stuff :)

I actually like the printer paper. We used that a lot when I was a kid and it just seems more...computer-y.

This guy is awesome!

I agree there should have been the brown paper but, willing to give that up (on all channels) if it's the only way to get this professor to do another video.

I think this was brilliant!

Good synthesis, I agree and I think I am on the same page, thank you. I hope you will like the next episodes, no spoiler 8-) I would like to know your view.

yes, that's the idea I'm trying to convey: autonomous processing of information makes the computer revolution something completely different from (but of course built upon) the print revolution. The political implications of the transformation of national states into information societies are known as "post-Westphalian" system. I hope I'm not being obscure. Cheers, Luciano

WE WANT MORE PHILOSOPHY PROFESSORS !!!!!

yay new video

You guys should make an Economicsphile channel or something.

You seem like a pretty sharp person. Bravo

Fellow viewers, my computer (win 7) will shut down (monitor goes blank) but the cpu won't power down. Any idea's how I can fix it?

I guess he's saying "history" was just written text and paintings. But "hyper history" is now video, photo's, electronic information, etc.

Oh my god, yesterday I was watching Matrix, and now I think prof. tries to tell us something when he mentioned being kicked out of technological loop

The video is meant to be about some of the philosophy surrounding technology, not specific technological viewpoints.

I saw Adelaide time, Brady's phone ?

How can you tell it's the CPU that won't power down? Even if you were in Sleep mode or Hibernate, the CPU is one of the things that will always stop being powered.

I really did not understand what he was getting at - can you help me to understand what he was getting at? Some baclkground - I work as a developer in .Net and have a BSc in Information Systems.

i really want the pen he used, it wrote so brilliantly

From Wikipedia "Hyper A prefix often used in scientific and technical words, to denote something above or beyond the usual, normal, expected, or healthy level. Sometimes used to mean extreme or specifically "more than super-". Hypersonic, much faster than the speed of sound, i.e. extremely supersonic." In the video: hyperhistory = extreme history, due to not just a connection between human welfare and ICT but a relation of dependency.

Of course they do. My point has nothing to do with whether computers have had a huge impact on the world, but rather whether that should be called "hyper-history", or (as I believe), that it has nothing to do with the the pre-history/history separation to begin with, and shouldn't be addressed in that respect.

It's not really that different if you're looking at it as a system that gets things done but it is different for us as individuals. Computers and robots are already having an impact on occupations that are mostly manual labor and as we move towards more complex computers that can replace people in more and more fields we have to consider how our societies are going to deal with that.

Will we benefit so much from unfettered transaction and information flow we put aside national languages and currencies as handicaps?

The truth is out there and it's wonderful! I understand that it can be terrifying. If that is the case, my advice is to learn more about it. It's often hard to fear what you understand.

'Virtual history' is maybe another way of explaining your concept. So that's the fast passed history of our digital domain.

I like this guy! For anybody who wants to hear more about the ramifications of cyberwar, I recommend listening to Mikko Hypponen, who has a bunch of speeches here on youtube!

No that's from a movie called War Games, which is what DEFCON was based off of.

I didn't get how information processing by technology is called Hyper-Hystory. I didn't get the relation.

beautiful handwriting!

Key word being 'people'. Now we have technology that can do this for us.

4:36: scene from "WarGames" (1983) good movie!

Where've you been the last 15 years?

But how can technoly always be in-between but then also all of a sudden at the end and at the start? :/

Speak for yourself; I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Do more on hardware

His point still stands. We won't go back to pre-history because most people nowadays are much more knowledgeable. Our societies are more evolved, it's not like we'll go back to stoning each other for being witches and whatnot.

It's a little more than a philosophy, after all, he did state the fact that the means by which human kind has recorded its own history has been modified and developed. I think he is talking about the importance of this change.

An interesting related phenomenon is the rise of AAI, or artificial artificial intelligence. These are schemes where a computer "AI" outsources jobs to human brains to perform tasks that it can't do itself. For example, recaptcha is connected to a copy-center that digitizes books. The scanner autonomously submits words where it has a low confidence of what is scanned to recaptcha and after a thousand humans deciphered the captcha, it can digitize the word with high confidence.

Clever man

Still not ending with /computerphile, I see. I think it'd be cool.

And if computers will eventually program other computers, coming to a technological singularity?

Yes, and I sense that computers as an end in themselves are not of particular interest to Brady, as he has farmed this channel out to one Sean Riley. I am intrigued at the indirect approach of this channel in attacking computer-related topics. If it was confined strictly to computer hardware this would get boring pretty quickly. I like the fact they are not arbitrarily restricting themselves to physical computer hardware. It's nice to bring a philosopher to the "mix."

Fair enough. But if the system interacts with me in any way, I can influence it. Else I'm not a "user", I'm a "consumer". I don't mean that pedantically, as the meanings a miles apart and very important for such a wide implication and thought being presented.

it looked more like a epistemology class to me than a computers related video as he talked more about the meaning of the words and how they got it than anything that happens in or uses a computer..... Just as if numberfile had a video about the lifes and discoveries of the greatest mathematicians (just the names, no explanation or what it's useful for)

Because a culture that does not rely on sophisticated technologies would be unharmed by that kind of attack. So therefore the two histories can exist together. A tribe in the Amazon would not blink at an ICT, which may result in millions dying in a hyper-history culture. Hyper kind of means an extra layer to what already is.

No, that's from the movie War Games, on which the idea of Defcon is based.

Not only can we record for the future what is happening, we can also easily destroy that information and make it disappear without a trace.

The field of computing is as much a technological and scientific field as it is a social one. Computing affects society as a whole as you're problably aware of, especially given the recent NSA-gate mess.

i missed computer phile last week "my internet was cut off 4 not paying bills"

You saw the video too ? By the way its "Those who live by the digit" not "Those that live by the digit"

Oh god! The marker on paper is super bad in this video! I'm getting constantly shivers trying to listen to this guy, but that noise is like driving me insane. Marker on paper and Styrofoam rubbing together are the two sounds in the world that I just simply can't stand.

So the key process here is the autonomous element; not merely the recorded and that which records but that which records now processes and prioritises. We now have a run-away train that lays its own tracks? If this is a system of systems view of humanity, are we seeing the superseding of the autonomous society from the sovereign state to the cultural-block with potentially a pan-global political identity?

Imagine going out for dinner with this guy....

Would be a good teaser for Watch_Dogs. Amazing video!

Is he talking about a Fire Sale? Like in Die Hard 4?

this guy must be really fun at parties

I would definitely buy a t-shirt with: "Those who live by the digit die by the digit" on it.

I wanted to read something. Got catched by Computerphile. I´m not even mad.

Yeah, "very little =/= no user". Even if we have to count the first and only instance of user input to a robot/computer, there is never "no user" as all computers are made by a programmer at the start. Even the Nth computer/robot made computer/robot in a generation can trace it's input back to the first programer/user. This never "disappears".

Yeah it's about technology. I suppose the channel name techphile would be more fitting for this video, but what's done is done.

probs not, but which video. and thanks for the correction id edit my comment to correct it but i cant :(

more videos like this :)