The Civic Curriculum for the AI Age
Toward a Thriving Social Contract
A public learning project of The People’s Commission on Technology and the American Future
Twelve pieces, published weekly from August 12 through October 26, 2026.
This page is the full agenda: what each chapter covers, when it arrives, and what question it is trying to answer. It will be updated as chapters publish, and links will be added here as they go live.
How to use it. You can read the Curriculum straight through, or start with whichever chapter speaks to your situation. Each one stands on its own. Each ends with questions for individual reflection and for group deliberation — they are meant to be argued with, not agreed to. If you want to run a deliberation where you live, the questions are the raw material.
Orientation — The Choice Before Us
Wednesday, August 12
AI brings extraordinary possibility and genuine risk. The opening frames the Curriculum’s central task: helping citizens prepare for several plausible futures and participate in deciding what kind of society technological progress should create.
The question: Why should ordinary citizens have a voice in how this unfolds — and what would it take to exercise one?
Part I — The Human Question
Chapter 1 — What Is Work For?
Monday, August 17
Work is more than a paycheck. This chapter examines the relationship among paid employment, contribution, identity, security, belonging, and human worth — and asks what society owes people when technology changes the role of work.
The question: If a machine can do what I spent fifteen years learning to do well, what exactly have I lost?
Part II — Understanding the Transformation
Chapter 2 — What Is AI Actually Changing?
Monday, August 24
A plain-language guide to AI, generative AI, large language models, and agents. It explains the difference between automating a task and replacing a human role, and gives citizens practical questions for evaluating AI claims in the real world.
The question: What are these systems actually doing, and how would I know when someone is overselling them?
Chapter 3 — We’ve Been Here Before, and We Haven’t
Monday, August 31
What earlier technological transformations can teach us about work, prosperity, disruption, and institutional response — and where the historical comparison stops being a reliable guide.
The question: Does “technology has always created more jobs than it destroyed” still hold, and what did that adjustment actually cost the people who lived through it?
Chapter 4 — Five Futures: What Happens From Here?
Monday, September 7
An open scenario map of the AI future: the AI Slowdown, the Assistive Economy, Uneven Transformation, Extraction Without Abundance, and Abundance Without Employment. The chapter asks what preparation is wise even when no one can predict which future arrives.
The question: What should we do now that would still be right under several very different outcomes?
Part III — Power, Institutions, and Democratic Choice
Chapter 5 — Who Gains, Who Loses, Who Decides?
Monday, September 14
AI is not only a technological development; it is a question of ownership, bargaining power, productivity, and distribution. This chapter examines who captures AI’s gains, who bears its risks, and whose interests shape how it is deployed.
The question: When a technology raises output, what determines whether wages follow?
Chapter 6 — Who Governs the AI Transformation?
Monday, September 21
A citizen’s map of the institutions shaping AI: companies, investors, workers, Congress, executive agencies, courts, states, schools, local government, civil society, and citizens themselves.
The question: If I wanted to contest a decision made by one of these systems, who would I go to?
Chapter 7 — What Are Our Choices?
Monday, September 28
An even-handed guide to the major policy choices before the country: worker transition, portable benefits, education, public-interest AI, ownership, income support, worker voice, local resilience, and democratic accountability — with the honest arguments against each.
The question: Which of these would actually help, and which are reassurance in policy form?
Part IV — Building a Society That Can Flourish
Chapter 8 — AI, Information, and Democratic Power
Monday, October 5
AI is changing not only work but the information environment on which self-government depends. This chapter examines media, synthetic content, platform power, and the civic infrastructure a democracy needs to think clearly.
The question: What happens to public argument when the cost of producing convincing falsehood falls to nearly zero?
Chapter 9 — The Salutogenic Standard
Monday, October 12
How should citizens judge whether AI is improving life? Building on Aaron Antonovsky’s question — not what makes people sick, but what keeps them well — this chapter applies a standard of comprehensibility, manageability, meaningfulness, belonging, and democratic agency to policies, workplaces, technologies, and institutions.
The question: We ask whether a system is accurate, efficient, and profitable. What if we also asked whether people can understand it, contest it, and remain capable alongside it?
Chapter 10 — The Thriving Social Contract
Monday, October 19
The capstone asks what Americans should be able to expect from one another in an age of accelerating technological change — and invites citizens to deliberate about a social contract that protects dignity, shares prosperity, expands capability, and honors the next generation.
The question: Have we placed too many of the foundations of a decent life inside the institution of employment?
Epilogue — The Citizen as Co-Author
Monday, October 26
The future of AI will not be decided by technology alone. The Curriculum closes by connecting understanding to participation: learning, questioning, deliberating, organizing, building, holding power accountable, and revising our common work as the evidence changes.
The question: What is the smallest useful thing I can do next?
What this is, and what it isn’t
This is not a technical course, and it will not teach readers how to build AI systems. It is a shared framework for understanding what AI may change, deliberating about the choices before us, and identifying meaningful ways to act.
The Curriculum is the learning half of the work. The People’s Commission on Technology and the American Future is the other half — a method for moving from understanding to deliberation to action. One helps us understand the choices. The other helps us exercise citizenship within them.
Subscribe and the chapters arrive on Mondays. Join the Moonshot if you want to be part of the deliberation rather than only the readership — and tell me what this transition makes you hopeful about, worried about, or curious about. Your answers shape what I investigate.
An Editor’s Note from Moonshot Press
Moonshot Press is a human-led, AI-augmented publication. This article was written and edited by Shimon Waldfogel, MD, with artificial intelligence used to support research, questioning, synthesis, and editorial development. Shimon retains responsibility for the final judgments and published text.
AI collaborators used in developing this article: [list only the models actually used].