Technology at the service of people
Las Naves, the innovation center of the Valencia City Council (Ayuntamiento de Valencia), acknowledging the dizzying escalation of technological progress, has incorporated into its MissionsVLC2030 strategic framework the commitment to promote Technohumanism in the era of Big Data, the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence, with ethical and humanist values, in its commitment to innovation aimed at improving people’s lives.
2020 marks the beginning of the greatest Technological Transformation in the history of humanity. Never before had such a volume of innovations been produced continuously and concurrently. It is the beginning of the Fourth Digital Transformation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution and of all the Emerging Technologies associated with them.
These innovations are appearing at a pace that far exceeds our capacity for assimilation at the individual level, even for those with a high level of technological knowledge. A notable inequality is being created in the different levels of adoption by people, not only because of generational or purchasing-power differences, but also because of the difficulty of accessing the right information in such a complex, advanced technological context.
Europe has not been able to match today’s disruptive technology leaders for some time, but now it has a unique opportunity to be the voice of the people. With credibility and coherence, it can lead a historic Second Renaissance, in which the Human Being is placed at the center and it is Technology that is put at the Human Being’s service.
Technological innovation is something we cannot ignore in our lives, since it encodes and determines what we have been, what we are today and what, in all likelihood, we will be in the years to come. But it needs to be intimately linked with the ideas of philosophy, ethics and humanism, so that it stays within channels that offer us the best of its attributes and minimize its potential dangers.
This union between thought and technology is called TecnoHumanismo (Technohumanism), and it arises from applying the ideas and theses of the human disciplines to the most innovative technologies and to their development in this decade of the 2020s.
Within the Technohumanist movement, Las Naves’ IANética project is born as a meeting point and forum for debate for the development of a normative ethics around the proper use that should be made of Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Everything, so that the Technohumanist maxim of putting Technology at the Service of the Human Being becomes a reality.
The project is driven by Pedro Mujica: Humanist Technologist, Computer Science Engineer, professor of emerging technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and doctoral candidate in the development of the new Human-Machine Interaction for the hybridization of Artificial Intelligence with Extended Reality (Virtual, Mixed and Augmented). It begins with its web platform, which will go ONLINE at the end of April and will address, throughout 2020, the various themes raised by the Technohumanist debate, such as the Fundamental Rights of the Human Being in the face of the use of Advanced Digital Technologies.
From the public sector, from social and urban innovation and from our MissionsVLC2030 framework, Las Naves feels connected with this European idea and this way of thinking that places the person at the center of everything. We understand it not only as the only possible form of development but as the only form that represents a genuine delivery of public value.
Originally published in Spanish on IANética (2020). English version prepared for TecnoHumanismo.
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