In his article Open Problems in the Philosophy of Information [1] Luciano Floridi presented a Philosophy of Information research program in the form of eighteen open problems, covering the following fundamental areas: Information definition, information semantics, intelligence/cognition, informational universe/nature and values/ethics. We revisit Floridi’s program, highlighting some of the major advances, commenting on unsolved problems and rendering the new landscape of the Philosophy of Information (PI) emerging at present. As we analyze the progress of PI we try to situate Floridi’s program in the context of scientific and technological development that have been made last ten years. We emphasize that Philosophy of Information is a huge and vibrant research field, with its origins dating before Open Problems, and its domains extending even outside their scope. In this paper, we have been able only to sketch some of the developments during the past ten years. Our hope is that, even if fragmentary, this review may serve as a contribution to the effort of understanding the present state of the art and the paths of development of Philosophy of Information as seen through the lens of Open Problems.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy did not leave us a legacy of a social systems theory. Nonetheless, reconstructing his general approach to systems provides us with several ideas on how to build a theory of social systems. The concept of social relations easily connects to Bertalanffy's concept of relations of organization. His way of thinking underlines that social relations, as any relations of organization, are unobservables that long for theoretical means of understanding. His conception of the world would assign social relations a special place in a hierarchy of processes internal to a social system—they represent the whole of the system that nonetheless emerges from the interaction of the actors as parts thereof. Last but not least, his world view would orient us towards an organization of social systems in which the dialectic of social relations and actors balances unity and diversity as an Ought. These three main ideas of Bertalanffy offer system theoretical pillars that can inspire current social theory.

Digital Humanism, formulated in 2019, is an explicit demand for the development and application of human-centred technology, that is, for “pulling” a humanised and humane digitalisation instead of “pushing” it for merely economic reasons. Under the title above, the scientific encounter of inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives has aimed at presenting and questioning the conception of that trend. Special emphasis has been placed on the link between digital technology and the urgent societal goals of mitigating, if not resolving, the existential multi-crisis humanity faces today.

This paper is an attempt to achieve an understanding of the situation the evolution of humanity is confronted with in the age of global challenges. Since global challenges are problems of unprecedented complexity, it is argued that a secular paradigm shift is required away from the overemphasis on allegedly neutral standpoints, on a mechanistic picture of the world and on deductive logics towards accounts of emergence, of systemicity, informationality and conviviality, building upon each other and providing together a transdisciplinary edifice of the sciences, in the end, for, and by the inclusion of, citizens. Viewed from such a combined perspective, the current social evolution is punctuated by a Great Bifurcation similar to bifurcations other emergent systems have been facing. On the one hand, humankind is on the brink of extinction. It is the world occurrence of the enclosure of commons that is detrimental to sharing the systemic synergy effects and thus to the cohesion of social systems. On the other hand, humanity is on the threshold of a planetary society. Another leap in integration would be the appropriate response to the complexity confronted with. Humans and their social systems are informational agents and, as such, they are able to generate requisite information and use it to catch up with the complex challenges. They can establish convivial rules of living together in that they disclose the commons world-wide. By doing so, they would accomplish another evolutionary step in anthroposociogenesis. The concept of the Global Sustainable Information Society describes the framework of necessary conditions of conviviality under the new circumstances.