Thirty Years Later: The Informational and the Evolution of Consciousness

The paper deals with the development of the informational since the IFIP '71 Congress in Ljubljana when the new consciousness evolved to the necessity of nowadays informational society. A new methodological and technological challenge enters into the view of the future information systems, their design and implementation. The challenge is called informational consciousness the human and the artificial one. Thirty years ago, at the IFIP '71 Congress in Ljubljana, nobody could foresee the advances in development in the field of the informational, that is, of computational, communicational, methodological, technological, scientific, theoretical, applicative, organizational, and managerial. Thirty years in the informational development is an exceptionally long period of surprise, experience, change, and the evolution of consciousness, although thirty years is only a good half of the average professional working life. No a participant of the the IFIP '71 Congress in Ljubljana could predict the technological and methodological progress happened in the field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and information systems in the last thirty years. Much more surprising than the advance of the theoretical and applied computer science was the revolution in the design and manufacturing of computer technology hardware and software setting new standards in application possibilities, operation speed, large memory arrays, net accessibility and net communication. Thus, information processing system and communication network, called the World Wide Web, could come into existence. As the consequence, the Internet became the largest communication and working information system and information environment with its own consciousness, constituted by the man-machine interface structure and organization. Kevin Kelly, the executive editor of Wired explained why the users of Internet are constitutionally not able to comprehend the emergent consciousness of the web (Kelly, 1998). The organization of a computer system, its informational structure and the human interaction within an information system, could emerge diversely in goals and implementation. In the beginning of 1960's, that which astonished me mostly and substantially, was the possibility to write a program for a complex mathematical recursive function in Algol 60. How could it happen that mathematics most profound concept of recursive function entered directly, in the form as it was expressed mathematically, into the domain of the program executing digital machine? Recursiveness expressed by the program circularity was a kind of imitation happening in human consciousness controlling the process of directed or intentional reasoning,