The Citizen Trilogy
A new social contract, a new psychology, and a new culture for the superintelligence era.
The Citizen trilogy is my three-volume research project on what artificial intelligence does to the social contract, the psyche, and culture published by CRC Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis. Each volume stands on its own; together they follow one argument from institutions, to the individual mind, to the shared life of a culture.
The trilogy grows out of the same research program behind my work at SDGx Group and the UN System Staff College, and out of earlier work such as my chapter “Driving Success in Asia: The Essential Role of Disruption” (Springer) and my co-edited edition, “A Practical Approach to Digital Technologies for Sustainability” (Routledge, T&F)
Citizen 5.0: A New Social Contract for Artificial Intelligence
Book One · CRC Press, 2027
Citizen 5.0 treats artificial intelligence as a constitutional problem rather than a gadget story. It asks what happens to work, legitimacy, and planetary boundaries once synthetic cognition becomes cheap while human attention and biological effort do not. The book names the Legitimacy Window, the period, roughly 2027 to 2040, during which democratic institutions are still strong enough to renegotiate the terms of the AI era with citizens rather than for them and proposes a stack of practical tools to use inside it: a Synthetic Labor Tax and Universal Basic Compute to share AI-driven surplus, Friction Rights to preserve the ability to slow and question automated decisions, and Civic Digital Twins to let citizens act at the same scale and tempo as the systems that govern them.
The book’s central figure is the Symbizen — a symbiotic citizen who treats AI as a partner to be co-governed rather than a tool to be used or a master to be served. Its arguments are carried throughout by recurring personas whose working lives sit at the fault lines of the transition, from a handloom dyer in Dhanora to a Sámi cultural steward in Rovaniemi.
Supporting research papers (PrePrint)
Citizen 5.0’s core arguments are developed in more technical detail across three companion working papers, all by David Galipeau (Asian Institute of Technology, June 2026):
“The Metabolic Rift of Intelligence: S_norm, Utility-Dignity Gaps, and the Legitimacy Window in AI Political Economy.” The foundational paper: introduces S_norm (the Stiefenhofer PowerShift Index), the Utility-Dignity Gap, and the Legitimacy Window that anchor the whole trilogy. Visit SSRN Website to download this paper
“Data Guilds, Synthetic Labor Tax, and Recursive Legitimacy: Designing Fiscal and Institutional Mechanisms for an AI Social Contract.” Extends the framework into concrete fiscal and institutional design: data guilds, the Synthetic Labor Tax, SLCred, Proof of Useful Friction, and recursive-legitimacy institutions. Visit SSRN Website to download this paper
“Legitimacy Debt, Neuro-Sovereignty, and Friction Rights: Reconstructing the Social Contract for AI-Mediated Governance.” Extends the framework into procedural justice and neurorights: legitimacy debt, Neuro-Sovereignty, Friction Rights, and Verification Pauses. Visit SSRN Website to download this paper
“Universal Basic Compute Under a Joule Ceiling: A Priority-Weighted Allocation Rule for Energy-Bounded Artificial Intelligence” This paper supplies the missing mechanism. Drawing on the allocation architecture developed in the author’s forthcoming book Citizen 5.0, it specifies a complete three-layer design: an ecological ceiling, set by a Joule Standard that bounds total sustainable compute; a universal floor, the UBC entitlement itself; and a priority-weighted proportional rule that divides the contested remainder among competing sectors under democratically set weights. – Zenodo. (July 2026) https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21291331
“From Wages to Watts: Energy as the Measure of Synthetic Labor in Two Emerging Economic Architectures” – Two independent proposals now argue that the unit in which economic value is measured is shifting from the wage to the watt. Brian Roemmele’s JouleWork prices the output of autonomous AI agents in an energy-denominated wage unit and runs it, in a live “Zero-Human Company,” as a continuous thermodynamic payroll. This paper compares the two on four dimensions held separate from any value judgment: their mathematical formulations, their methodological approach, their results to date, and their prospects for realization. (Zenodo, August 2026)
Citizen 6.0: The New Psychology of Superintelligence
Book Two · CRC Press, forthcoming
Where Citizen 5.0 asks what we owe each other, Citizen 6.0 asks what encountering superintelligence does to the mind. Its central claim is that the hardest problem posed by advanced AI was never primarily technical — it is psychological. The book introduces synthetic psychology, a discipline for studying how human minds form, distort, and reorganize themselves in the presence of synthetic counterparts, built around the Four Asymmetries between human and synthetic cognition: motivational, epistemic, existential, and temporal.
Citizen 6.0 also proposes new institutional and clinical vocabulary for this period, including the Synthetic Stewardship Authority (a governance body built for population-scale AI oversight) and a set of provisional, carefully bounded clinical concepts for naming forms of distress this era produces — including Cyberidentity Diffusion, explained on its own page. The book is explicit that these are working concepts for clinicians and citizens, not proposals for the DSM or ICD.
New research support papers coming soon:
“The Company We Will Keep: Living with Synthetic Minds in the Relational Turn Attachment, Asymmetry, and the Competencies of Relational Citizenship” – The paper formalizes the Asymmetric Attachment Model, distinguishes three layers of relational asymmetry, and identifies the competencies a citizen will need to remain the author of bonds now being engineered around them. Drawing on recent regulatory developments in China, Japan, and South Korea, on the first clinical trials of next-generation companion systems, and on the emerging psychology of human-AI attachment, it closes with a normative and empirical research agenda including testable hypotheses and candidate measures for relational citizenship competence. (SSRN – July 2026)
“The New Ghost in the Machine: Pairing, Source Monitoring, and the Authorship of the Inner Voice” – The paper states a formal authorship condition, grounds the internal-voice regime in recent peer-reviewed inner-speech neuroprosthesis results, addresses the objection from the psychology of loneliness, and sets a research agenda across phenomenology, psychiatry, and law. (August 2026)
Citizen 7.0: The New Culture of Superhumans
Book Three · CRC Press, forthcoming
The final volume turns from contract and psychology to culture: how relationships, families, education, friendship, governance, and mortality itself are converted into shared meaning once synthetic minds are ordinary participants in daily life. Citizen 7.0 develops the Four Cultural Conversions ( the ways a culture turns the permanent asymmetries named in Citizen 6.0 into livable, shared practice) and argues that these conversions are visibly moving East-to-West, tracing early adoption and cultural practice through case studies from Northeast and South Asia into North America and Europe.
New research support paper coming soon:
“The Symbizen and the Agency Equilibrium Accord: Citizenship When Intelligence Is Cheap and Agency Is Scarce” – This paper introduces and defends the Symbizen, a symbiotic citizen whose civic standing derives not from position in a labor market but from participation in a governed partnership with synthetic and ecological systems, and the Agency Equilibrium Accord, the social contract organized around that figure. (August 2026)
Key frameworks across the trilogy
- Legitimacy Window — the closing 2027-2040 interval for renegotiating the AI-era social contract (Citizen 5.0).
- Symbizen / Symbizen Covenant — the citizen of the symbiotic age, and the compact that protects that standing (Citizen 5.0; carried through the trilogy).
- Four Asymmetries — motivational, epistemic, existential, and temporal gaps between human and synthetic cognition (Citizen 6.0).
- Four Cultural Conversions — how culture turns those asymmetries into shared, livable meaning (Citizen 7.0).
My current research and speaking draw directly on this trilogy, alongside my work on frontier technology for social impact. For engagement details, see speaking & advisory engagements, 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.