Joël de Rosnay

Former research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the field of biology and computer graphics, he was successively Scientific Attaché to the French Embassy in the United States, and Scientific Director of European Enterprises Development Company (a venture capital group) from 1971 to 1975.

De Rosnay is particularly interested in advanced technologies and the applications of system theory; his concept of the macroscope, a "big picture" view of the globe and its residents, was published in 1975.

De Rosnay is the author of several scientific books aimed at a wider public, such as: De Rosnay’s ideas have inspired various technology businesses and modern cultural works by creatives, entrepreneurs, and academics, notably around his notion of the cybiont.

In The Symbiotic Man, De Rosnay defines a unit of a wholistic social structure, expanding on the concept of the singular living holobiont to also include the totality of human-made machines.

He terms this set the cybiont - an emerging “planetary macro-organism” of biological and synthetic entities, all operating in synchrony as a cybernetic system.