PurposeBy introducing the basic concepts and theories of the philosophy of information created by Kun Wu, and making some comparisons of the philosophy of information and related information theories between Wu and other scholars, this paper aims to have Chinese philosophy of information widely known and understood by more people in the world, thus promoting the international exchanges between Chinese and Western scholars on the topic of philosophy of information.Design/methodology/approachThe main research methods used in this paper are the literature review and the comparative study. On the one hand, it reviews some related concepts and theories in Kun Wu's academic works of philosophy of information. On the other hand, it compares the thoughts and viewpoints of Kun Wu with those of other scholars.FindingsFirst, Kun Wu is the first person who has established a complete and comprehensive theoretical system of philosophy of information in China; second, Kun Wu's philosophy of information is significant in originality and value, which could be thought as the intellectual quintessence of information age, thus worth learning. Third, with more international exchanges, Chinese philosophy of information created by Wu will surely be more and more influential in philosophical circles at home and abroad.Originality/valueIt is a very valuable first-hand material for Western scholars to know and understand Chinese philosophy of information.

When we enter intelligent society, we need to rethink about the topic of human essence. As we know, human beings have no absolute, fixed essence. The essence of human beings is the combination of an innate substrate and acquired creation. As the degree of machine intelligence in the development of human society continues to increase, human beings are constantly changing and creating their own essence, and they are also constantly liberated from the bondage of a certain single old essence, creating and enriching the richer and more diverse aspects of its essence. The transformation of labor from its alienation to its return is also a transformation of labor from the centralized form to the non-centralized form of human essence according to Karl Marx. The new fusion of artificial intelligence and bioengineering will lead to a new track of evolution that “reshapes and regenerates” life itself. This new evolutionary path will fuse the two-track evolution, biological evolution and cultural evolution, which have been relatively isolated in the traditional sense. If human beings are able to work hard together to design and implement a new social system that adapts to the future intelligent development, then the comprehensive development of intelligence that human beings bring about would be not a disaster, but a bright future.

As the degree of intelligence in social development increases, the future society will present new features. For example, the necessary labor time for humans will be greatly shortened. The direct result of this is the rapid growth of unemployed people. Many jobs in the future society will be replaced by intelligent machines, and a differentiation of new social stratification will emerge, bringing new social problems and new institutional appeals. The innovations of this article are: first, “the rapid growth of the unemployed people is a great progress of society” is the creative idea of this article, which is different from the views of many economists; second, this article envisions a differentiation of a new social stratification of the future society—the base stratum, the middle stratum, and the top stratum—and analyzes the social problems brought about by the differentiation of new social stratification; third, this article puts forward the institutional appeal of a shared society based on the principle of economic distribution of “social security + distribution according to labor”, and proposes reasonable philosophical suggestions for the future development of humans.

As the degree of intelligence in social development increases, the future society will present new features. For example, the necessary labor time for humans will be greatly shortened. The direct result of this is the rapid growth of unemployed people. Many jobs in the future society will be replaced by intelligent machines, and a differentiation of new social stratification will emerge, bringing new social problems and new institutional appeals. The innovations of this article are: first, “the rapid growth of the unemployed people is a great progress of society” is the creative idea of this article, which is different from the views of many economists; second, this article envisions a differentiation of a new social stratification of the future society—the base stratum, the middle stratum, and the top stratum—and analyzes the social problems brought about by the differentiation of new social stratification; third, this article puts forward the institutional appeal of a shared society based on the principle of economic distribution of “social security + distribution according to labor”, and proposes reasonable philosophical suggestions for the future development of humans.

For the first time, the philosophy of information puts forward the world view of "the dual existence of material and information" and reclassifies the area of existence. It's viewpoint of "existence = material + information" establishes the theoretical origin of the information ontology and clarifies the value of the existence of information. Artificial intelligence is a new technical science for researching and developing theories, methods, technologies and application systems for simulating, extending and expanding human intelligence. The relationship between artificial intelligence and philosophy of information is very close. As a new philosophical principle or paradigm, philosophy of information has important guiding significance for the research and development of artificial intelligence.