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The very top position of the evolutionary ladder is – in most approaches – still being awarded to the individual human being.
Social systems, which assemble humans in a way similar to that of multicellular organisms, seem somewhat incomplete to be considered a next grand achievement of evolution. They appear to be missing clear-cut boundaries that could provide an autopoietic operational closure, allowing them to exist as autonomous, resilient beings.
Search for a potential new ‘Crown of Creation’ has, thus, turned somewhere else: towards the only human-based system that not only does posses a truly unambiguous boundary, but is also being currently witnessed to undergo a rapid increase of its internal complexity.
This emerging entity has been called ‘the Global Brain’.
Meanwhile, however, another systems-evolutionary theory has been formulated, which presents social systems in a radically new light. It’s author, Niklas Luhmann, claims that contemporary social systems can be best understood if described as truly posthuman, – i.e. systems, for which human beings are merely environmental resources, not constituents.
Such a view allows for a quite clear identification of their autopoietic boundaries, yet does not place them in any physical (spatiotemporal) dimension.

Luhmannian Social systems reside within the sphere of meanings and sustain themselves through distinction-making cognitive operations embedded in human communication.

The aim of my talk is to attempt an integration of that view into the theoretical framework developed by the GB thinkers. In that respect, two major points will be discussed.
First, that Luhmann’s taxonomy reveals yet another class of systems whose potential for suboptimization of GB should not be underestimated.
Second, even more interestingly, that – if, indeed, the top of the ‘ladder’ has been unnoticeably taken already – some of most interesting dynamics of the next metasystem transition will be taking place just between these two: the GB and the Luhmannian social systems.

Pour moi en tous cas c’est un thème majeur. Un débat peut-être un peu prématuré, comme les considérations de Nick Bostrom dans “Superintelligence. Paths, Dangers,Strategies (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Mais est-il trop tôt pour réfléchir à l’avenir… quitte, comme le note Jean-Yves, à ne pas trop se tromper sur les échéances.

---- Je sors un peu du sujet maintenant, en attendant d’aller surfer un peu sur Luhman et GB.

Mais la formulation de Jean-Yves appelle une remarque “… d’unpays, d’une région, d’une idéologie…”. Un pays ou une région, c’est local. Une idéologie, c’est mondial.

Une question-clé pour moi dans la préparation du monde de demain, c’est comment on divise les pouvoirs (à la Montesquieu). Depuis le traité de Westphalie (1648), la première division fondamentale, c’est l’état-nation (la “regio” dans le traité). Depuis la SDN et L’ONU, le TPI, etc, il s’agit de divisions du pouvoir à l’échelle de la planète.

L’insistance sur les différents modes de division dépend en partie des sensibilités politiques. En m’insiprant de Chantal Delsol, je dirais : à droite on pense volontiers “local”, à gauche on pense plus volontiers “universel”. Avec des excès possibles dans un sens comme dans l’autre.

De là, si on a une mentalité “ingénieur”, on dit “il faut régler le curseur”, si on a une mentalité “darwinienne” on dit “laissons jouer le débat,la dialectique”.

My current affiliation is: Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Faculty of Management and Social Communication. (I'm a prospective Post-doc of ECCO/GBI.)

Niklas Luhmann's Social Systems: First Posthuman Cognizing Species on Earth?