Self-developing systems are in the center of attention of post-non-classical scientific rationality (Stepin, 2003).The paradigm "subject – self-developing reflexive-active system (environment)" (Lepskiy, 2010) becomes a key paradigm of control and cybernetics. It is important to note that the environment is considered to be the meta-subject. As a result the paradigm can be presented as "subject – meta-subject".
A self-developing reflexive-active environment is a metasubject, which possesses invariant similar to the properties of subjects: purposefulness (activity), reflexivity, communicativeness, sociality, ability to develop, etc. Such an environment has integrity that essentially distinguishes it from networks. This is an interaction of active elements, organized in a special way. Active elements can be created on the basis of natural intelligence (the personality, group, etc.), on the basis of artificial intelligence (agents) and also on the basis of integration of natural and artificial intelligence.
The organization of interaction of active elements among themselves and with the environment in general is defined by the system of values, principles, ontologies (maintenance, support, development, designing, providing innovations), criteria (efficiency, safety, development, satisfaction) and also by the specialized subject-focused information platform (Lepskiy, 2010; 2015).
The idea of self-developing reflexive-active environments was created under the influence of the following inter-disciplinary ideas and concepts. Philosophy, sociology and psychology have given us the ideas of post-non-classical scientific rationality, which integrates concepts of various scientific schools (Stepin, 2005), ideas of noosphere (Vernadsky, 2007), the concept of the society as a social system (Luhmann, 1982), principles of the Russian psychology (Leontiev, 1978; Vygotsky, 1981; Rubinshteyn, 1997), studies of the Russian methodologists (Shchedrovitsky, 2002) and etc.
Cybernetics has given us an idea of second-order cybernetics by Heinz von Foerster (Foerster, 1974), Stafford Beer‘s models (Beer, 1981), W. R. Ashby principle of complexity in control (Ashby, 1956), the reflexive models of Vladimir Lefebvre (Lefebvre, 1967, 1982), a synthesis of representations of cybernetics and its development by Stuart Umpleby (Umpleby, 2014), ideas of Valentin Turchin about metasystem transition and concepts of the future of cybernetics