Architectural challenges for a dependable information society

This paper is two-fold. In the first part it tries to raise awareness on the level of complexity of future computer-based interconnected systems/infrastructures, at least as they are envisioned, and on the level of dependability we are today able to justify with confidence. It tries to motivate that fundamental methods and methodologies must be reconsidered, studied, exploited, assessed and applied to move towards an utopia that can be called "ambient dependability", a global view of the concept of dependability [Laprie, 1992], which encompasses not only the technological aspects but includes inter and multi disciplinary fields, which span over ergonomics, usability, education, sociology, law and government. The second part of the paper provides the authors views, based on their experience, on future directions and architectural challenges to be tackled for approaching, as a first step towards ambient dependability, at least an Information Society which we can depend on.