Purpose: Achieving specific changes within autonomous organizations is often a necessary condition for the success of strategic public policy. Wherever it is impossible to induce such changes by regulations, a frequently used tool is inducing their occurrence with financial stimuli. This practice appears to have been fully substantiated by the early systems-evolutionary understanding of the relationship between organizations and their environment, whose peak popularity in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with the appearance of new international organizations formulating strategic policies on a previously unprecedented scale. The conceptual framework available at that time failed, however, to provide a solid ground for operationalization and systemic evaluation of such interventions. As a result, even though it was implicitly presumed that policy implementation depended on organizational changes taking place in a large number of organizations, a conceptualization of the exact ways of how to ensure and assess such changes was hardly pronounced. This paper aims to uncover the problematique of that missing conceptualization. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the author draws on the second-order stream of systems thinking, arguing that without such a deliberate operationalization, it seems much more likely that the external financing of organizational changes functions merely as organizational “perturbations” which do not crystallize into lasting changes, as they are mitigated by equally potent “compensation” to cancel out the perturbations. Using the theory of social system’s autopoiesis, the author posits that adaptive fluctuations evoked in organizations by the interferences of the policymakers may thus be considered “change” just as well as non-change. Findings: Once the behavior of an autopoietic organizational system is seen as a continuous perpetuation of its own identity pattern, fashioned discursively as the organization’s self-description, then the only change which seems worthy of the publicly assigned resources and efforts is a shift in that pattern. Originality/value: It is argued that the assessment of whether target organizations are indeed implementing or only superficially performing (and instantly compensating for) the desired changes should be inferred from a qualitative analysis of the daily discursive practices that forge the target domains rather than by a comparison of the measurable parameters, which are currently dominating in the evidence-based paradigm.

We propose a venture into an existential opportunity for establishing a world ‘good enough’ for humans to live in. Defining an existential opportunity as the converse of an existential risk—that is, a development that promises to dramatically improve the future of humanity—we argue that one such opportunity is available and should be explored now. The opportunity resides in the moment of transition of the Internet—from mediating information to mediating distributed direct governance in the sense of self-organization. The Internet of tomorrow will mediate the execution of contracts, transactions, public interventions and all other change-establishing events more reliably and more synergistically than any other technology or institution. It will become a distributed, synthetically intelligent agent in itself. This transition must not be just observed, or exploited instrumentally: it must be ventured into and seized on behalf of entire humanity. We envision a configuration of three kinds of cognitive system—the human mind, social systems and the emerging synthetic intelligence—serving to augment the autonomy of the first from the ‘programming’ imposed by the second. Our proposition is grounded in a detailed analysis of the manner in which the socio-econo-political system has evolved into a powerful control mechanism that subsumes human minds, steers their will and automates their thinking. We see the venture into the existential opportunity described here as aiming at the global dissolution of the core reason of that programming’s effectiveness—the critical dependence of the continuity of human lives on the coherence of the socially constructed personas they ‘wear.’ Thus, we oppose the popular prediction of the upcoming, ‘dreadful AI takeover’ with a call for action: instead of worrying that Artificial Intelligence will soon come to dominate and govern the human world, let us think of how it could help the human being to finally be able to do it.

Five centuries after Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the idea of Universal Basic Income has largely remained on the utopian side of public debate – a political postulate rather than a policy. This chapter steps back from advocacy. It shifts the question from whether UBI is desirable to whether a workable scheme could be designed at all, under realistic constraints. Treating UBI as a design problem – or, more precisely, as a constraint-satisfaction puzzle – the chapter extracts from the contemporary debate nine feasibility constraints that any candidate scheme would have to satisfy at once. A design that satisfies one condition by breaking another does not hold together as a solution. The constraints are set out as a structured questionnaire any candidate UBI design can be tested against, with the iterative discipline of design thinking: any attempted fix typically shifts the stress to other constraints, and each design move has to be traced through the rest of the set. Different solvers reach different solutions because their political priors weight the constraints differently. A real feasibility analysis would therefore include structured public consultation, gathering and comparing stakeholder and expert responses to each question across the affected positions; the divergence in those responses is the substantive ground of democratic deliberation. Three trends now in motion are reshaping the conditions under which any UBI scheme would operate: workforce automation, the shift of returns from labour to capital, and the increasing internationality of AI-driven value chains. The question is hard – harder than the public debate typically registers, and getting harder as these conditions change. Any UBI scheme, at any scale, is acting as a small piece of a global puzzle.

As humanity exerts unprecedented influence over the complex systems that underpin our existence, fostering interdisciplinary thinking has become essential for society at large. This paper argues that cultivating integrative cognitive skills should be a primary aim of secondary education, not a pursuit reserved for elite postgraduate studies. Adolescence, a phase marked by a natural drive to challenge established worldviews and explore the unknown, offers a prime window for engaging with complexity. Yet traditional secondary education often lacks the pedagogical innovation needed to nurture these capacities. We call for a fundamental reorganisation of the secondary curriculum to enable second-order learning processes that integrate disciplinary knowledge and skills into a cohesive whole, a whole in which our existence is intricately embedded.

The question of this essay is whether the grand collective operation of humanity, termed the noosphere, can be seen as oriented by a methodological direction. Rewording the original ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in contemporary academic terms, I conceptualise the noosphere as an ongoing interrelating of cognitive processes: an interrelating which progresses through a particular kind of events. I define these noospheric events as instances of consciously contingent cognitive interiorisation. I propose that such rewording allows us to address the question of this essay quite precisely.

Licensing has played a significant role in shaping digital innovation, yet its influence within artificial intelligence remains insufficiently explored. While AI governance discussions often emphasise utility and regulation, licensing acts earlier in the technological lifecycle by embedding obligations, incentives, and normative commitments into the conditions governing the circulation of AI capabilities. This paper contends that licensing serves as societal infrastructure, influencing the distribution of value, power, and accountability on a large scale. Drawing on socio-legal scholarship, software-licensing traditions, platform governance, and contemporary AI policy, it introduces a conceptual framework for impact-oriented AI licensing — a design space in which contractual terms guide socio-economic, environmental, and epistemic outcomes. The framework develops a taxonomy of six governance profiles: Sustainability, Value, Access, Reciprocity, Openness, and Governance. Each demonstrates how specific commitments can function as portable, scalable mechanisms for shaping the downstream effects of AI. Where Creative Commons and open-source licensing attach conditions to intellectual property, this framework attaches conditions to the deployment and use of AI capabilities — a distinct licensing object that requires its own contractual grammar. By analysing the propagation of licence terms through supply chains, markets, and institutional practices, the paper shows that AI licensing can complement regulatory frameworks and facilitate a transition toward more equitable and accountable AI ecosystems. The conclusion advocates for coordinated research and experimentation to advance licensing as a critical yet underutilised instrument of AI governance.