A major school of German sociology places this at the core of its theory. According to this theory, modern societies are characterised in particular by the fact that individual subsystems of society reduce the complexity of their own (sub)system to the other systems to enable them to act at all; they fulfil what is called an "Entlastungsfunktion" (relief function). Prominent representatives of this school of thought are Max Weber, Arnold Gehlen and Niklas Luhmann.

In their view, it is modern institutions (public and private) which, as supra-individual entities, have long since become autonomous systems. The fact that the individual office-holders are human beings, meanwhile, is of little significance.

Hannah Arendt, in her theory of totalitarianism, attributed the effectiveness of both Nazi and Stalinist policies of extermination to the largly moral indifference of bureaucracy as a system.

In this sense, the task of controlling AI is a variation on the problem of harnessing a complex society consisting mainly of autonomous subsystems. This is a problem which has increasingly challenged humanity already for quite a long time. And it has been very difficult so far, even without AI ...