Our City-State — Why the AI Era Needs a Human Declaration
Based on Chapters 1, 3, and 7 of Xu Maodong's Our City-State: A Human Declaration for the AI Era
When AI begins writing poetry, composing music, coding software, making medical diagnoses, and even participating in judicial rulings, what we need is not smarter AI — but a clearer-eyed human declaration.
That is why I wrote Our City-State.
Why "City-State"?
The city-states of ancient Greece were the wellspring of human political wisdom. In the Athenian agora, citizens debated face to face, voted, and collectively decided the fate of their polis. This political form — small-scale, high-participation, direct democracy — was later replaced by empires and nation-states, because at large scale, face-to-face democracy became impossible.
But AI is changing that equation.
When AI can process vast amounts of information, translate languages in real time, simulate policy outcomes, and even help every citizen understand complex issues — "universal direct participation" suddenly becomes possible again. AI is not here to replace democracy. It's here to return democracy to its original form: everyone participates, everyone speaks, everyone votes.
This is the "Super City-State" — not a return to antiquity, but a reinvention of ancient wisdom through AI.
AI Governance Is Not a Technical Problem — It's a Social Contract Problem
Many people frame AI governance as a technical problem: algorithms must be transparent, data must be private, models must be aligned. All true, but nowhere near sufficient.
The real AI governance problem is a social contract problem:
- When AI knows you better than you know yourself, does your "informed consent" still mean anything?
- When AI makes more accurate decisions than human judges, would you accept a "robot judge"?
- When AI-generated content is more popular than human creations, who owns the copyright?
- When one nation's AI infrastructure is controlled by another nation, where is sovereignty?
None of these questions have standard answers. But one thing is certain: we cannot wait for AI to cause problems before we fix them. We need to establish the rules before AI fully permeates society.
From Super Individual to Super Civilization: A Thought Map
Our City-State is the final volume of my six-volume Industrial AI series. To understand this book, you need to understand the logic of the entire series:
- Super Individual — Individual scale: AI makes everyone a "one-person flagship"
- Super Company — Organizational scale: ten people, one billion — AI restructures corporate DNA
- Super Voyage — Global scale: digital citizens + globally resident enterprises
- Super City-State — Governance scale: AI-driven reinvention of cities and nations
- Super Civilization — Civilizational scale: how AI shapes the next chapter of human civilization
- Our City-State — Declaration scale: building on all of the above, humanity needs a shared declaration
These six books are not six independent writings — they form a thought map that progressively scales from "individual → company → going global → city-state → civilization → declaration." Each layer is the inevitable extension of the one before it. When individuals become powerful enough, organizational forms must change. When organizations become borderless, governance models must be restructured. When governance is restructured, the definition of civilization must be rewritten.
And Our City-State is the terminal station of this map.
Three Core Propositions of the Human Declaration
In the book, I propose three core propositions for a "Human Declaration in the AI Era":
First: Human Agency Is Non-Transferable
No matter how powerful AI becomes, the ultimate decision-making authority must belong to humans. This is not a technical question — it's a red line. We can let AI draft judicial recommendations, but the gavel must be struck by a human judge. We can let AI generate policy options, but the vote must be cast by human citizens.
"Assist, but do not replace" — this is the bright line of the human-machine relationship.
Second: AI Dividends Must Be Shared
The productivity leap brought by AI cannot benefit only a handful of tech giants and capital owners. If AI makes 1% of people richer and 99% unemployed, that is not technological progress — it's a social catastrophe.
In the book, I introduce the concept of an "AI Dividend Tax": a special tax on profits generated by AI replacing human labor, used to fund universal basic income, re-employment training, and the social safety net.
This is not anti-innovation. On the contrary: only by ensuring AI dividends are broadly shared can innovation be sustained. If the public turns against AI because it has stripped them of their livelihoods, that is the greatest threat to innovation itself.
Third: Digital Sovereignty Is Inviolable
In the AI era, data is the new territory, and compute is the new military power. A nation whose AI infrastructure is controlled by a foreign power has no true sovereignty.
I argue that every sovereign nation should build its own AI infrastructure — not as autarky, but to ensure autonomous and controllable AI capabilities in critical domains (defense, finance, healthcare, education). At the same time, we must promote a multilateral framework for global AI governance to prevent an AI arms race and "digital colonialism."
The City-State Is Us
I close the book with the poet John Donne's famous line: "No man is an island."
In the AI era, this line takes on new meaning: no one is an island, because we are collectively building a new city-state. This city-state exists on no map — it lives in the choices of every person who uses AI, in the decisions of every government that regulates AI, and in the code of every engineer who develops AI.
"Our City-State" is not one person's city-state. It is humanity's city-state. And the first brick in its construction is this declaration.
Maodong Xu, Our City-State: A Human Declaration for the AI Era, ISBN 978-1-970336-35-1, available on Amazon.