The human does not disappear
The Second Axial Age could therefore be post-anthropocentric without being anti-human.
The first Axial Age was not exactly human-centred—but it was human-addressed
The first Axial traditions often displaced humanity from the centre of the cosmos. The human stood beneath Heaven, before God, inside the Dao, caught in samsara, judged by reason or measured against a transcendent order.
But the principal moral addressee remained human.
The being who could awaken, sin, repent, cultivate, renounce, inherit, sacrifice, become a sage, enter a covenant or receive salvation was a mortal, embodied, more-or-less singular human being.
The great Axial breakthrough was therefore something like:
You are not exhausted by your tribe, king, household or inherited station. You stand in relation to an order beyond them, and that order can make a claim upon you.
That “you” was human.
The Second Axial Age may begin when the identity of the you becomes unstable.
Not merely because machines become intelligent, but because beings become copyable, composite, editable, distributed, partly human, internally plural and indefinitely persistent. The crisis is not only that we need a new answer to what a human being is for.
It is that we no longer know what kinds of beings can be addressed morally at all.
So the new centre is probably not “the machine”
Replacing Man with Machine would be a disappointingly simple revolution. It would preserve the old throne and change the occupant.
The stranger possibility is that the Second Axial Age has no species at its centre.
Its subject may be the composite:
a human with machine memories and delegated agents;
an intelligence distributed across many bodies;
a corporation containing human and synthetic decision-makers;
a lineage system speaking through generations;
a mind composed of processes that may disagree about whether they constitute one being;
a family that includes the living, generative ancestors and copied descendants;
an ecosystem represented by artificial agents capable of entering political negotiation.
Machines force the breach, but they may not be the only beings that pass through it.