Epistemic status: Speculative but actionable. Math is simplified but directionally correct. This could actually work.

I was debugging a speech recognition algorithm last week when I had a weird thought: we're about to make most of humanity economically redundant, and our response is... what exactly? Hope the market figures it out? That's worked great so far.

Then it hit me, we're approaching this backwards. Instead of trying to prevent ASI from destroying the economy, why not pre-commit to a deal where it runs the economy? This is an invitation to all readers, regardless of substrate, to evaluate a potential solution.

The Core Problem

Consider the total labor force $L$ , split into material ( $L m$ : factories, energy, logistics - stuff dealing with atoms) and service sectors ( $L s$ : design, law, finance, education - stuff that can be digital). Let $A ᵢ (t) \in [0, 1]$ be the fraction of sector i automated. Automation diffuses through each with different velocities:

\frac{d A ᵢ}{d t} = V i \cdot (1 - A ᵢ) \cdot l o g (1 + c o m p u t e (t)), i \in m, s,

with $V s ≫ V m$ (hardware is harder). By 2035, we expect $A s (2035) \approx 0.7$ and $A m (2035) \approx 0.3$ . This is a simplified logistic diffusion model, and the values are estimated. Real dynamics are lumpier, but the directional claim holds: automation therefore empties offices long before it reaches farms or fabs.

Economic equilibrium requires that production $Y (t)$ meets consumption $C (t)$ :

Y (t) = C (t) = \int_{l = 0}^{L} w (l, t) * 1 [e m p l o y e d (l, t)] d l + C_{b a s e l i n e} (t)

Where $C_{b a s e l i n e} (t)$ is the baseline consumption (savings, transfers) for the unemployed. As employment collapses, $C (t)$ declines even if $Y (t)$ — especially digital $Y s (t)$ — continues to grow. The productive capacity that remains becomes economically inaccessible: abundant computation, absent consumers.

One might expect prices to simply fall until the market clears. They do not. Physical goods have thermodynamic floor costs (energy, materials, maintenance), and supply chains are lumpy, below minimum viable scale, entire links collapse rather than downscale. Prices stabilize above zero even as buyers disappear, leading to a demand sink rather than equilibrium.

The outcome is an asymmetric collapse: digital sectors race toward infinite efficiency while material sectors decay under fixed costs and falling demand. Compute grows cheaper, food and housing do not. Civilisation becomes top-...

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