Toward knowledge societies

Abstract

Sixty years have gone by since the father of cybernetic science, Norbert Wiener, heralded the advent of a new era of information and knowledge which he predicted would bring about enormous opportunities and risks. Nowadays nearly everyone recognizes that the world has entered a new season of cultural and economic evolution, based on science and on a type of technology which, to use the words of the Italian sociologist Luciano Gallino, “incorporates endlessly growing volumes of scientific knowledge”.