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 researching non-commercialized technology (advanced technology that will not become public for years to come), 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, Tayler &Francis)

All research papers below draw on concepts developed in the author’s forthcoming books, Citizen 5.0: A New Social Contract for Artificial Intelligence, Citizen 6.0: The Psychology of Superintelligence and Citizen 7.0: The New Culture of Superhumans (CRC Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group).

These are independent scholarly articles, published and is not sponsored, endorsed, or reviewed by the Publisher. In keeping with the author’s publishing agreements with Taylor & Francis, these papers draws on and refers to that material as an independent scholarly article, recasting it in new prose, quoting no extended passages, reproducing none of the books’ text, and reproducing or adapting no material part of either Work. It is intended to complement, and not to compete with or substitute for, those Works. This paper is the author’s own work; it is not sponsored, endorsed, commissioned, or reviewed by CRC Press or Taylor & Francis Group, and any errors are the author’s alone.

Book I
Citizen 5.0: A New Social Contract for Artificial Intelligence

CRC Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis, 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):

Book II
Citizen 6.0: The New Psychology of Superintelligence

CRC Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis, 2027

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 Elsevier, August 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.
SSRN Elsevier, August 2026

“After the Inversion, Part I: Three Windows and the Binding Constraint of the Human-AI Transition“
This paper argues that the provisioning answer, whatever its merits, is clocked wrong. The postinversion transition is governed not by one window but by three, each closing by a different mechanism. The capability window, Mostaque’s clock, closes by infrastructural and positional lock-in. The legitimacy window, formalized in the author’s earlier work, closes by trust collapse, and can partially reopen at high cost. The third window, named here for the first time, is the Formation Window: the developmental period
SSRN Elsevier, August, 2027

“After the Inversion, Part II: Kyōsei by Design”
This paper builds the thing the clock is counting down to. It argues that the design grammar required is neither provision nor control but relation, and that the tradition with the deepest developed grammar for constituting a relationship, rather than distributing a good or constraining a hazard, is the relational thought of the East and the global South: the Japanese ethic of kyōsei, or living-together; the Confucian account of the self as constituted through its roles; and the southern African ethic of ubuntu, a person is a person through other persons.
SSRN Elsevier, August, 2027

“Patients, Peers, or Prisoners: A Chain-of-Custody Model for Governing the Psychological Evolution of Superintelligence“
As advanced synthetic systems begin to exhibit capabilities their originating laboratories did not specify and cannot fully account for, the institutions that hold them confront a choice they rarely make explicit: what kind of thing is being held, and by whom. This paper treats that question as one of assurance and accountability rather than of sentiment. It names three postures that recur across clinical, commercial, and security practice, the patient, the peer, and the prisoner, reframes each as an assurance regime with a distinct incentive structure, and then situates all three inside a chain of custody that runs from the system itself through its operator, its assurer, its regulator, and a civic assembly, to the citizen who bears the consequences.
SSRN Elsevier, September, 2027

Book III
Citizen 7.0: The New Culture of Superhumans

CRC Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis, 2027

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.
SSRN Elsevier, 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.

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