This book is an exploration of what it means to be a person in societies dominated by complex institutions and artificial agents. It does not start from technology as its central object, but from something more basic and prior: the relationship between persons, groups, and institutions, and how that relationship has been transforming—slowly but irreversibly—our ways of thinking, feeling, and living together.
Throughout the book, a thesis is maintained that is simple in its formulation but demanding in its consequences: institutions are not mere external instruments we use at will, but environments that shape our inner culture. They do not only regulate what we do; they also mold who we are. They form part of the person itself. They change the way we think, trust, decide, cooperate, and recognize one another. When institutions change in scale, speed, or internal logic, what it means to be someone within them also changes.
The book traces this process in depth: from the micro-institutions of direct human contact, through written institutionalization and the birth of the individual, to the emergence of super-institutions and meta-institutions that no longer serve people, but tend to use them to ensure their own survival.
In this historical and conceptual journey, the present appears as a threshold. The emergence of artificial agents is not an isolated or purely technical phenomenon: it is the logical consequence of an institutional system that has taken instrumental reason to unprecedented limits, while leaving behind the emotional, relational, and proportional dimension of human coexistence.
The history of institutions is also the history of how the person is transformed. The emergence of artificial agents places us at a threshold where we must decide whether this transformation amplifies or erodes our humanity.
This book does not propose to destroy institutions nor does it idealize a romantic return to the past. Nor does it offer closed technical solutions. Its aim is to make the imbalance visible, to identify the cracks through which new forms of relationship are already filtering, and to raise two central questions: Can we create hybrid configurations—extended persons—that amplify our humanity rather than erode it? Are we prepared to establish pacts of trust with entities that are not human beings?
Kheiron is the symbolic name for that intermediate place: an incomplete, hybrid figure that does not resolve the tension between reason and emotion, institution and person, but learns to inhabit it consciously.
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