From Computing Machineries to Cloud Computing: The Minimal Levels of Abstraction of Inforgs through History

Abstract

Before the modern computing era, the word `computers' referred to human beings as living calculators---in fact, still Turing (1950) proposed his test for A.I. referring to `computing machinery', not `computers'. From the advent of general-purpose, Turing-complete machines the relation between operators, programmers and users with computers---inforgs, in Floridi's terms---can be seen in terms of levels of abstraction (LoA) (Floridi 2010, 2008). For example, the modern concept of `operating system' (Donovan 1974) by Ken Thompson from Multics to Unix can be seen as a level of abstraction: some computational tasks are hidden in an abstract machine put into the computer system so that humans can forget it instead of manually perform the task as living operators: information got hidden, without being lost. In this paper an analysis of LoA throughout history is proposed, in order to find the minimal number of LoAs needed to explain the epistemology of informational organisms (inforgs)---from early modern general-purpose computing machineries until the so-called `cloud computing'. This epistemological levellism uses Category Theory as the methodological reference, treating information as structure-preserving functions instead of Cartesian products, i.e., a domain mapped into a codomain where the inner structure is preserved; a comparison with the method of LoA by Floridi (2008) is then proposed.