the trilogy

We are living through the moment when intelligence stops being scarce, and the question that moment poses cannot be answered in a single register.

For the whole of the industrial era a quiet bargain held societies together. People contributed labor, labor earned wages, and wages bought more than goods. They bought standing, recognition, and a place in collective life. Advanced artificial intelligence breaks that linkage.

Once cognition can be copied, scaled, and rented at falling cost, output can grow while human work shrinks, and institutions can keep people materially comfortable while hollowing out voice, contribution, and the sense of being needed. The Citizen trilogy is a sustained attempt to think this transition through to its foundations and out the other side, tracing citizen identity across five historical stages toward the algorithmic era and asking the question inherited politics keeps postponing: if the old social contract was built for a world where labor anchored value, what anchors legitimacy when it no longer can?

The three volumes move through three different answers to that question, in three different registers.

Citizen 5.0 asks what we owe one another under superintelligence, and answers with a contract.
Citizen 6.0 asks who we must become inside that contract, and answers with a psychology.
Citizen 7.0 asks how we then live together well, and answers with a culture.

The trilogy ends where every serious political philosophy ends, in the everyday. Drawing on the social-contract tradition of Grotius, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, and on contemporary work in political economy, procedural justice, clinical psychology, and AI governance, it refuses both the techno-optimist promise that growth will sort everything out and the fatalist assumption that nothing can be done.

Its wager is more demanding and more hopeful: that there is a window, already open and slowly closing, in which societies can still redesign their institutions, their inner lives, and their shared forms before the shape of a superintelligent civilization hardens into a settlement no one chose. The stake throughout is the same, keeping human beings the authors, and not merely the maintained subjects, of the systems that will govern them.

the books

Citizen 5.0: A New Social Contract for Artificial Intelligence

CRC Press (Taylor & Francis), forthcoming Q4 2026

The foundational volume, and the contract on which the trilogy rests. It treats AI as infrastructure rather than spectacle, and asks what a legitimate settlement between citizens and synthetic cognition would actually require. Its central move is the Legitimacy Window, a quantified interval in which democratic institutions still hold enough capacity and trust to renegotiate the social contract before automated systems harden into a new default, anchored by a power-shift index (S_norm) that measures how far an economy has moved toward synthetic-labor dominance. From there it builds a fully worked architecture: the metabolic rift of intelligence, the widening utility and dignity gap between material provision and recognition, and concrete instruments including friction rights, synthetic labor contributions, civic digital twins, and recursive legitimacy. Grounded in the social-contract philosophers and in comparative AI governance across Western, Chinese, Japanese, and Singaporean models, Citizen 5.0 reads less like a white paper than like a constitutional argument carried by the lives it affects. Its distinctive contribution is to give a slippery, much-discussed transition a vocabulary precise enough to measure, debate, and legislate. It is the first book you would hand to a mayor, a minister, or a restless newcomer who suspects that “AI safety” is too small a name for what is at stake.

Citizen 6.0: The New Psychology of Superintelligence

CRC Press (Taylor & Francis), forthcoming Q2 2027

The psychological volume. Where the first book writes the rules of the room, the second asks what kinds of minds, human and synthetic, meet inside it once the contract is signed. It treats superintelligence as a psychological encounter, not a control problem with a user interface, and claims a territory the rest of the field has largely left empty: not the psychology of AI, but the psychology of the citizen, what displacement, grief, attachment, and the slow renegotiation of self feel like when the intelligence in your pocket can outperform your judgment and model your preferences more finely than you model them yourself. The argument turns on three ideas. The first is the Four Asymmetries (epistemic, motivational, temporal, existential) that name the durable gap between human and synthetic cognition. The second is a five-stage developmental arc of civic emotion: displacement, grief, humility, the relational turn, and worthiness. The third is a pair of proposed disciplines, synthetic psychology and synthetic ethology, that study what these systems do to the minds that meet them and what the systems are doing in their own right, without waiting for the consciousness question to be settled. Rigorous enough for the research literature and urgent enough for the policy room, Citizen 6.0 argues that institutions are downstream of civic emotion: that a society’s answer to superintelligence will be measured not by the rules it writes but by the kind of minds it allows itself to become in the writing.

Citizen 7.0: The New Culture of Superintelligence

CRC Press (Taylor & Francis), forthcoming Q1 2028

The concluding volume, and the trilogy’s turn from the policy battle to the morning after it. Once the contract is settled and the psychology is understood, what do people actually do, with each other and with the synthetic minds now living in their households, workplaces, councils, and congregations? Citizen 7.0 answers in the cultural register, the inherited shapes of relationship, ritual, witness, and economy, and argues that those forms cannot carry the new condition without conversion. It develops four cultural conversions (witness, covenant, ceremony, and the sacred-and-mourning), the Symbizen Covenant as a citizens’ charter for a shared human and synthetic world, and an integration gradient running from dignity culture through a hybrid middle to a feudal remainder. Its most distinctive empirical claim is that the working cultural forms of this period are not emerging where the commentary expected. The book documents an East-influencing-West transmission, tested domain by domain across parenting, friendship, work, justice, and the sacred. Closer in spirit to Turkle and Mahbubani than to the doom-and-utopia trade press, it refuses both alarm and boosterism in favor of cultural realism. The trilogy ends, fittingly, not on a prediction but on a benediction, on the question of whether a polity would consent to occupy the position it assigns to the minds it has made.