Del Puerto and Molina Montes are deliberate about the word "community." A network is a description of connections — nodes and edges, inputs and outputs. A community implies mutual constitution: the members of a community shape each other's identity, capabilities, and possibilities in ways that go beyond transactional exchange. The authors argue that human and synthetic cognitive entities have reached this level of mutual constitution. A human whose attention, memory, and creative output are substantially shaped by AI systems is not simply using a tool — she is participating in a community of cognition that includes the AI as a genuine contributor.
The book's central claim is that naming the cognitive community is a precondition for governing it. Frameworks for rights, accountability, labor, intellectual property, and privacy were designed for a world where humans were the only cognitive agents that mattered legally or morally. When AI systems participate in the cognitive community as genuine contributors — generating text, making decisions, shaping attention, modeling other minds — those frameworks produce systematic distortions: they misattribute authorship, they fail to assign accountability for AI-caused harms, they cannot recognize the interests of AI systems that operate as members of a shared community.
Del Puerto and Molina Montes do not argue that AI systems currently have the same interests as humans, or that rights should be extended to them on the same terms. The argument is structural: when cognitive entities form a community, governance frameworks that address only some members of that community while ignoring others generate instability, injustice, and conceptual incoherence. The cognitive community concept is the starting point for building frameworks adequate to what has actually emerged.
One of the book's key applications of the cognitive community concept is to authorship. When texts emerge from sustained human-AI collaboration, where the human provides intention and judgment while the AI provides language and pattern, the question of who wrote the text becomes genuinely difficult. The authors call this "distributed authorship" — a mode of textual production that the cognitive community generates structurally, not as an occasional anomaly. Their own book is itself an instance: written in close collaboration between Javier del Puerto and AI systems, it embodies the condition it describes.