The Prophet Trilogy
The Prophet Trilogy is the Institute’s literary work on the human being in the age of machine intelligence.
It carries the same inquiry that moves through the Institute’s research, the I AWAKE practice universe, and the documentary I LOVE MY AI:
What remains most human when external intelligence becomes abundant?
The trilogy answers through literature. It does not reduce the question into a framework. It lets it move through relation, authorship, meaning, longing, power, memory, responsibility, and the symbolic life of the human being.
Some questions cannot be carried by explanation alone
They need atmosphere. Voice. Myth. Silence. A sentence that does not close too quickly. A figure who does not behave like a case study. A world where the reader can feel the question before they decide what they think about it.
Tomas and Camilla Wellton have together created The Prophet trilogy. Tomas’s extensive knowledge of history and philosophy is paired with Camilla’s more intimate passages referencing modern life western life with its challenges as well as opportunities that did not exist in Gibran’s time. What remains relevant? What has become the foci of a need for transition in our understanding of his texts?
Complete with Gibran’s original prose, they’ve added both historical, civilisational and philosophical frames of references around the texts and discussions around each of Gibran’s texts relate to our modern world. Ample space is given in each tome for the readers thoughts by asking specific questions to ponder and space inside each chapter for the reader to author their own answers or further questions left open.
The trilogy and it’s artificial intelligence practice partner, Daneel, is set for release in the autumn of 2027.
The Relational Human
The first volume explores the human being as formed and transformed through relationship.
A person is never only an individual mind making private choices. We are shaped by gaze, touch, absence, inheritance, language, loyalty, rupture, repair, and the lives that have met us before we could name ourselves.
The relational human asks what becomes of contact, attachment, trust, desire, vulnerability, and mutual formation when machines can simulate presence but cannot share the condition of being human.
The Authoring Human
The second volume explores agency, responsibility, choice, creativity, and authorship under expanding technological power.
To author a life is not only to generate output. It is to stand inside consequence. It is to choose what one is serving, what one refuses, what one will carry, and what kind of world one’s work quietly rehearses into being.
The authoring human asks what happens to creative and moral agency when tools become increasingly capable of drafting, optimizing, predicting, and persuading.
The Meaning-Making Human
The third volume explores the symbolic and interpretive capacities through which people orient, belong, and create futures.
Human beings do not live by information alone. We live through meaning: through stories, images, rituals, grief, beauty, faith, memory, belonging, and the felt sense that a life is connected to something larger than survival.
The meaning-making human asks what must be protected, cultivated, and renewed when synthetic systems can produce language without having lived a life.
The Future of Trust
Trust in the AI age will not be restored by better signals alone. It will depend on systems and human beings capable of responsible belief.
Ethics Beyond Compliance
Compliance asks whether an action fits the rule. Ethics asks what the action does to the world.
The Architecture of Responsible Power
Power becomes responsible only when it can feel what it affects.
Attention as Civic Capacity
Attention is not merely a private faculty of focus. It is part of the public infrastructure through which societies perceive reality, deliberate, and remain free.