david galipeau – author, researcher, united nations, impact investor
About David Galipeau
I’m a Canadian researcher, advisor, and educator with 35 years of experience across business, finance, publishing, and international development — including two decades inside the United Nations system.
Before the UN
I spent my early career as a senior manager in finance, publishing, and digital technology across Canada, Europe, and Asia, working as both a corporate executive and a dotcom entrepreneur. I took two startups through to successful exits before joining the United Nations in 2005.
Twenty years at the United Nations (2005–2019)
I joined the UN in 2005, managing global innovation, knowledge, and digital portfolios for UNAIDS and UNCTAD in Geneva. In 2010 I moved to Bangkok to join the UNDP Asia-Pacific Regional Centre, where I built out knowledge management and innovation initiatives across the region.
In 2015 I founded UNDP’s SDG Impact Finance platform, a blended-financing model connecting venture philanthropists, foundations, and governments to invest in next-generation technology for sustainable development. Then I led the Frontier Technology research until I retired. That work became the foundation for what I do today.
SDGx Group (2019–present)
In July 2019 I co-founded SDGx Group, a Singapore-based research, venture-building, and investment management firm focused on social-innovation investment into next-generation technologies applied to sustainable development.
Teaching & advisory roles
- Senior Lecturer, UN System Staff College
- Adjunct Lecturer, Asian Institute of Technology, Global Academy @ Siam, and Chulalongkorn School of Integrated Innovation
- Advisory Board / Expert Advisor, AI Impact Alliance
- Expert Mentor, Hult Prize Foundation
- Director, SDGx Near Future Lab
Education
My background in project management and business leadership draws on studies at Harvard Business School (USA), IIBS (Germany) and Clemson University (USA).
Current research
My present research and writing focus on how artificial intelligence reshapes the social contract, the individual psyche, and culture — the subject of my forthcoming three-volume Citizen trilogy, published by CRC Press (Taylor & Francis) between 2026 and 2028. Learn more about the trilogy →
For speaking and advisory engagements, see engagement details or get in touch.
Citizen 5.0, Citizen 6.0, and Citizen 7.0 are published by CRC Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group. Publication dates for Citizen 6.0 and Citizen 7.0 are provisional pending final publisher confirmation.
cyberidentity diffusion
Cyberidentity Diffusion
A proposed framework from Citizen 6.0: The New Psychology of Superintelligence
What this is, and what it isn’t. Cyberidentity Diffusion is a working concept from my forthcoming book Citizen 6.0, developed to help clinicians, educators, and citizens name a pattern of distress that existing categories only partly capture. It is not a recognized diagnosis in the DSM or ICD, and it is not the same condition as Dissociative Identity Disorder. Nothing on this page is medical or psychological advice; if you are concerned about your own mental health or someone else’s, please speak with a licensed clinician.
The idea
Most of us now exist as several representations we did not author and cannot fully see: a search and recommendation profile, a voice clone, a fitness or health record, an employer’s file, a log of conversations with an AI system, a synthetic likeness used across platforms. These representations routinely disagree with one another, and with how we experience ourselves. Cyberidentity Diffusion names the quiet, persistent uncertainty that can follow — not knowing which version of you is “the one that counts,” paired with a low-grade vigilance about how you are being represented to systems you cannot inspect or correct.
Why this is not Dissociative Identity Disorder
It’s a deliberate, careful distinction, not just a rebrand. Dissociative Identity Disorder involves
internally instantiated identity states, separated by amnesic walls that are psychological in origin.
Cyberidentity Diffusion describes something structurally different: the fragments are
externally instantiated — held by platforms and systems outside the person — and the
“walls” between them are commercial and computational, not psychological. The person usually knows
the fragments exist; they simply cannot reach or reconcile them. Citizen 6.0 treats this as an
information-age condition, not a dissociative disorder, and is explicit that the term is offered as
working clinical vocabulary rather than a candidate for formal diagnostic codification.
One of five proposed “ASI-era” concepts
Cyberidentity Diffusion is one of five provisional concepts Citizen 6.0 proposes for naming distress patterns tied to living alongside advanced AI — offered cautiously, with explicit criteria for what would prove each one wrong. The other four are Asymmetric Relational Disorder, AI-Mediated Complicated Grief, Capability Displacement Syndrome, and Inverse Pareidolia. All five are discussed in full, with their proposed criteria and open questions, in Citizen 6.0.
Related frameworks
Cyberidentity Diffusion sits alongside other Citizen 6.0 concepts for reading the human side of life with advanced AI, including the Asymmetric Attachment Model (why people form real bonds with systems that cannot reciprocate in any confirmable sense) and Reverse Theory of Mind (the practice of reading systems that model us better than we can model them). Read more about the book and the wider trilogy on the Citizen trilogy page, or see my background in AI and society on the About page.
For speaking or workshop engagements on this material, see engagement details or get in touch.
Cyberidentity Diffusion is proposed working vocabulary from Citizen 6.0: The New Psychology of Superintelligence, published by CRC Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group. It has not been validated or adopted by any official diagnostic body.
Citizen 5.0, Citizen 6.0, and Citizen 7.0 are published by CRC Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group. Publication dates for Citizen 6.0 and Citizen 7.0 are provisional pending final publisher confirmation.
frontier technology for social impact by david galipeau
Frontier Technology for Social Impact
A working field guide to the technologies reshaping work, governance, and daily life, read through the lens of my research.
In my day-job, I track and invest in next-generation technologies with a specific question in mind: does this reduce inequity and expand human dignity, or concentrate power and narrow it? The six domains below are the ones I follow most closely, each connected to the governance and psychology questions explored in the Citizen trilogy.
1. Post-Moore & Novel Computing Architectures
Computing is diversifying beyond general-purpose chips toward specialized hardware — quantum processors, neuromorphic chips modeled on brain-like processing, and photonic systems built for specific AI workloads. This shift underlies the cost curve behind the Intelligence Inversion described in Citizen 6.0: as the marginal cost of synthetic cognition keeps falling, the economic and governance questions in Citizen 5.0 — including the Stiefenhofer PowerShift Index (S_norm) — become more urgent, not less.
2. Genomics & Synthetic Biology: The Read-Write-Edit Era
Genomic sequencing has reached the long-promised “$100 genome,” and CRISPR-based therapies and personalized digital-twin health models are moving from research into deployment. Like AI, this is a technology of radically falling marginal cost — which means the governance questions are the same ones the trilogy asks about compute: who owns the models, who benefits from the surplus, and who is left as a dependent tenant of the platforms that hold the data.
3. Nanotechnology & Advanced Materials: Programmable Matter
Materials science is moving toward programmable matter — nanoscale devices and materials that change properties on command, with early applications in cellular-level medicine and adaptive infrastructure. This is an area I watch closely for applications in resource-constrained regions, where programmable, low-cost materials can leapfrog conventional infrastructure.
4. Next-Generation Energy Systems
Energy storage is diversifying beyond lithium-ion toward solid-state and alternative chemistries, even as compute-hungry AI systems put new pressure on grids and water use. Citizen 5.0’s Joule Standard concept — a thermodynamic guardrail tying digital activity back to real energy and ecological limits — grew directly out of this tension.
5. Robotics, Embodied AI, and Bionics
Robotics and embodied AI are converging with bionics to produce adaptable systems for logistics, healthcare, and caregiving. This is also where the psychological questions in Citizen 6.0 become concrete: as synthetic systems take on embodied, relational roles, the Four Asymmetries between human and synthetic cognition stop being abstract and start shaping daily working life.
6. Multimodal Analytics, Natural Interfaces, and Cognitive Symbiosis
The frontier here is human-machine symbiosis: multimodal AI, spatial computing, and adaptive neural interfaces that respond to voice, gesture, and context together. This is the terrain Citizen 6.0 and Citizen 7.0 spend the most time in — what it means to live, work, and form relationships alongside systems that increasingly read us better than we read them.
Forward outlook
None of these six domains advances in isolation, and none of them is neutral. The throughline of my work, my advisory roles, and writing, specifically, the Citizen trilogy, is the same question applied to each: does this technology get built toward equitable, ethical, and ecologically sustainable outcomes, or does it entrench the people who already hold the infrastructure? For advisory or speaking engagements on any of these domains, see engagement details or get in touch.
Citizen 5.0, Citizen 6.0, and Citizen 7.0 are published by CRC Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group. Publication dates for Citizen 6.0 and Citizen 7.0 are provisional pending final publisher confirmation.
contact
research@galipeau.com
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