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Artificial intelligence and robotics will generate enormous wealth this decade. Whether that wealth lifts the many or concentrates among the few is not a technological question. It is a question of coordination — and the window to decide it is closing.
Two technologies — advanced AI and robotics — are about to multiply what an economy can produce. Mainstream institutions agree on the scale: the IMF estimates AI will affect roughly 40% of jobs worldwide and 60% in advanced economies, and concludes it will "likely worsen overall inequality." Goldman Sachs estimates 300 million jobs are exposed globally. The disagreement is not about whether the machine age is coming. It is about who will own its output.
This paper contrasts two trajectories. In Trajectory A — the continuation of today's system, in which coordinating large numbers of ordinary people is slow and expensive while capital coordinates instantly — the gains of automation flow to the owners of the machines. We project, as an illustrative scenario anchored to current data, that roughly the bottom 80% of households lose real income over ten years while the top decile, the top 1%, and the top 0.1% capture multiples of theirs.
In Trajectory B, a buyer-side coordination layer — provisionally called CommonsEnt — is adopted as a public utility, like water, electricity, or the internet. The same productivity gains arrive, but cheap coordination lets the broad public bargain, aggregate demand, and hold recirculated ownership in the new capital. Every decile rises, the largest proportional gains accrue to those who have least, and — crucially — the top still grows, on the foundation of a larger and more stable economy.
The central finding is about time. Once AI and robotics capital concentrates and market structure hardens, a fair coordination layer becomes far harder to build. On current trends, the window is open for only a few years. This is an argument for urgency.
There is a quiet asymmetry beneath modern economic life: it is cheap to coordinate capital and expensive to coordinate people. Almost everything about who gets what follows from that single fact.
Consider how easily money organizes itself. A corporation can raise capital from thousands of investors in an afternoon, direct it through a single decision, and act with one will. Shareholders need never meet; the market coordinates them automatically. A firm can hire lawyers, lobbyists, data scientists, and pricing algorithms, all pointed at a single objective: maximize the return to the owners. Capital, in short, coordinates at near-zero cost. It moves as one body.
Now consider how hard it is for ordinary people to do the same. To negotiate collectively, to pool purchasing power, to push back on a price, to align a million scattered individuals around a shared interest — this has always been slow, costly, and fragile. Unions take years to build and can be broken in months. Consumer boycotts fizzle. Voters face a collective-action problem so severe that economists have spent a century explaining why rational individuals routinely fail to organize even when they share an obvious common interest. The demand side of the economy — workers, consumers, citizens, patients, borrowers — is structurally fragmented. It moves, when it moves at all, as a crowd: slowly, partially, and late.
This is not because one side is virtuous and the other is not. It is a difference in infrastructure. Capital inherited, and then built, the tools of fast coordination: corporate law, capital markets, the firm itself. The demand side never got an equivalent. There is no utility you can plug into that lets ten million people bargain as one the way ten million dollars already do. The asymmetry is structural, and because it is structural, it compounds. Every gain the coordinated side wins buys it more capacity to coordinate next time, while the fragmented side starts each round from scratch.
A concrete illustration makes the compounding vivid. When a firm wins a pricing advantage, it earns more, and some of that surplus is reinvested in still-better coordination tools — sharper analytics, more lobbyists, more sophisticated contracts — which win the next advantage more easily. The demand side has no comparable flywheel. A consumer who overpays this year is not thereby better organized next year; the surplus extracted from them flows to the other side's flywheel, not their own. Over decades, this ratchet is most of the story of why the gap between the coordinated and the fragmented widens regardless of which party holds office or which policies are tried at the margin. The asymmetry is not a villain's scheme. It is the cumulative result of one side having a coordination flywheel and the other side not having one at all.
Most debates about inequality focus on outcomes — wages, taxes, wealth — and argue about remedies after the fact: redistribute more, tax differently, raise the floor. These matter. But they treat the symptom. The cause sits upstream, in the asymmetry of coordination that determines how the gains of any new technology are divided before any tax or transfer touches them. When a new source of productivity appears, the question of who captures it is decided by who can organize fastest to claim it. And the coordinated side always organizes fastest. That is what "coordinated" means.
This is why the same technology can produce wildly different societies. The printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the internet — each multiplied what was possible, and each was divided according to who could coordinate to capture it. The machine age now arriving is the largest such multiplier yet. The only question that matters for how it is shared is whether the coordination asymmetry that has governed every prior wave will govern this one too.
Artificial intelligence and robotics do something no previous technology did: they let capital substitute directly for human labor across a vast range of tasks, and — this is the decisive twist — they deploy first on the side that is already coordinated. AI arrives as a product sold to firms, integrated into existing supply-side infrastructure, pointed at existing supply-side objectives. The coordinated side gets the new superpower first, and uses it to coordinate even faster.
The consequence is an acceleration of the asymmetry precisely at the moment its stakes become existential for the demand side. When a machine can do a job, the wage that job paid does not vanish — it converts into a return on the capital that owns the machine. Income that used to flow to a worker now flows to an owner. If the people whose labor is being displaced cannot coordinate to claim a share of the machines, the displacement is simply a transfer: from labor to capital, from the fragmented many to the coordinated few.
This is not a fringe worry. The International Monetary Fund, surveying the evidence, concluded plainly that AI will "likely worsen overall inequality," with higher-income workers positioned to gain and lower-income, older workers likely to fall behind. The mechanism the IMF describes is exactly the asymmetry: those positioned to own and direct the technology capture its gains; those positioned only to be replaced by it absorb its losses.
So the future forks. Down one path, the asymmetry runs its course: automation proceeds, capital captures the surplus, and the demand side — lacking any infrastructure to coordinate a claim — watches its income erode even as total output soars. Down the other path, the demand side finally gets what capital has had for centuries: a cheap, ubiquitous way to coordinate. Same machines, same productivity, entirely different division of the result.
The remainder of this paper traces both paths concretely, in dollars, across the next two, three, five, and ten years. We begin with where we are today.
A note on method. The starting point of every projection that follows is real, anchored to U.S. Census, Congressional Budget Office, IMF, and Goldman Sachs data. The forward paths are illustrative scenarios — structured expressions of where each system's logic leads, not precise forecasts. Their purpose is to make the direction and magnitude of a choice visible, not to predict a number.
Before projecting forward, anchor the present. In 2024, U.S. median household income was roughly $80,000, but the average conceals a steep gradient. The bottom fifth of households averaged about $18,000; the middle fifth about $84,000; the top fifth about $316,000 — and that top fifth alone took home 52% of all national income, a share that has climbed for fifty years while the bottom's has shrunk.
Translated into deciles — ten equal slices of households from poorest to richest — the starting distribution looks like this. Note that the tenth decile's average is itself pulled upward by an extreme tail; the top 1% and top 0.1%, shown separately later, live far above even the top decile's average.
This is the board on which the machine age will be played. The question is how each square moves over the next decade. To see that, we first have to look not at how much each group earns, but at where that income comes from — because that is what determines who is exposed when machines begin to do the work.
Automation does not strike incomes at random. It strikes labor. And the share of income that comes from labor falls as you climb — which means the machine age runs its fault line straight through the middle and bottom of the distribution.
The Congressional Budget Office's income-composition data reveals the structural vulnerability with unusual clarity. For households in the bottom and middle of the distribution, the overwhelming majority of income is labor — wages and salaries — supplemented by transfers. For the top, the picture inverts: among the top 1%, labor accounts for only about a third of income; the rest is capital — business profits, dividends, interest, capital gains. The top 1% alone now claims over half of all capital income in the economy.
Read this chart as a map of exposure. The teal band is labor — the part of income a sufficiently capable machine can replace. For the bottom 80% of households, that band is most of their livelihood. For the very top, it is a sliver; their income rests on the brown band of capital, which automation does not threaten but enriches, because the machines doing the displacing are themselves capital, and their returns flow to capital's owners.
This is the engine of Trajectory A in a single image. When a machine takes a task, an income stream moves from the teal band to the brown band — from the many who depend on labor to the few who own capital. No malice is required. No one need decide to harm anyone. The transfer is automatic, a property of who owned what when the technology arrived. The coordination asymmetry then ensures the losers cannot organize a claim on the machines fast enough to matter.
The baseline composition is only a snapshot; the machine age sets it in motion. Under Trajectory A, the trend in each group's income sources moves in a consistent and corrosive direction. For the bottom three deciles, the labor share of income falls as automatable entry-level and routine work thins out, and the gap is filled — incompletely — by transfers, deepening dependency on a state that must tax the machine-owners to fund it. For the broad middle, deciles four through eight, the labor share that today anchors their security erodes year over year with nothing adequate to replace it, since these households hold too little capital to benefit from rising capital returns. For the top decile and above, the capital share, already dominant, grows further still, until by the ten-year mark the very top derives almost the entirety of its income from owning the systems that displaced everyone else's labor.
This is the deepest meaning of the fault line. It is not merely that incomes diverge; it is that the kind of income diverges. The economy splits into a small population living on capital and a large population living on shrinking wages and growing transfers — two groups with structurally opposed interests, related to each other increasingly as owners and dependents rather than as participants in a shared enterprise. Trajectory B's central structural achievement, as later sections show, is to keep capital income from becoming the private preserve of the few — to let the source of income that grows in the machine age belong broadly, so that the population is not cleaved into owners and dependents along the very line the technology draws.
Now run the logic forward. Goldman Sachs estimates AI could automate the equivalent of a quarter of all work hours, with a base case of 6–7% workforce displacement over roughly a decade of adoption — and a wide band of uncertainty above that. The first effects are already visible: unemployment among younger workers in tech-exposed occupations rose nearly three points in 2025 alone. Robotics extends the same dynamic from cognitive work into physical work over a slightly longer horizon.
In Trajectory A, the proceeds of that productivity accrue to the owners of the systems, while the labor income of the middle and lower deciles — the teal band from the previous chart — erodes. The deciles whose income is most concentrated in automatable cognitive and clerical labor are hit hardest and first. The result is a hollowing: the middle sags, the bottom is held up only partly by transfers, and the top decile pulls away.
The shape matters as much as the levels. This is not a uniform decline that a simple raise could fix. It is a structural divergence: the same economy growing in aggregate while most of its households grow poorer in real terms, because the growth and the households have been decoupled. By the five-year mark the pattern is unmistakable; by ten years it has hardened into a different kind of society. And note which groups fall furthest — not the very bottom, which transfers cushion, but the broad middle, the deciles that thought of themselves as secure.
The political danger of this shape is specific: it betrays the group most invested in the system's legitimacy. A middle that did everything right — educated itself, worked, saved — and still slid backward is the raw material of every crisis of legitimacy in modern history.
The previous chart could not honestly show the top 1% and top 0.1% on the same axis as everyone else — they are too far above it. In 2021 the top 0.1% of U.S. households averaged $16.5 million in income, having grown 69% in just two years, the bulk of it capital gains. Plotted on their own scale, their trajectory under the default path runs the opposite direction from the deciles below.
This is the asymmetry's logic taken to its conclusion. The same force that hollows the middle — labor income converting into capital returns as machines take tasks — is precisely what lifts the summit, because the summit is the capital. Every efficiency gain that removes a wage from a household's ledger adds a return to an owner's. The top 1% roughly doubles its real income on this path; the top 0.1%, whose income is almost entirely capital, does better still.
It is worth stating clearly that the people at the summit need not be villains for this to happen, and mostly are not. They are simply positioned on the right side of the fault line when the machines arrive. The system rewards that position automatically. This is exactly why the remedy cannot be moral exhortation directed at individuals; it must be structural, aimed at the coordination asymmetry that converts a technological windfall into a concentrated one.
Two final views complete the picture of Trajectory A. The first tracks the share of all national income going to the top 10% versus the bottom 50% — the jaws of the distribution, opening over time.
The second view is, in some ways, the deepest. It tracks labor's share of national income — the fraction of everything the economy produces that flows to people for their work, rather than to owners for their capital. For most of the postwar period this share hovered around 69%. In Trajectory A, as machines absorb tasks and the proceeds accrue to capital, labor's share collapses. This is the single number that most cleanly captures whether an economy still attaches its people to its prosperity.
When labor's share falls this far, wages can no longer be the primary mechanism by which ordinary people share in growth — because there is progressively less labor income to go around relative to the size of the economy. A society can respond to that in two ways. It can expand transfers indefinitely, turning most of its population into dependents of a state that taxes the machine-owners — politically fragile and corrosive to dignity. Or it can change who owns the machines, so that capital income, the part that is growing, belongs broadly rather than narrowly. The first is Trajectory A's only available patch. The second is the door to Trajectory B.
In the default future, the economy keeps getting richer and most of the people in it keep getting poorer. Both things are true at once, and that is the whole problem.
Imagine the demand side of the economy could coordinate as cheaply and instantly as capital already does. That is the entire intervention. Everything good in Trajectory B follows from removing one cost.
Water, electricity, the internet — each began as a privilege of the few and became infrastructure for everyone, a utility you simply plug into. Each, once universal, unlocked a wave of activity that was impossible when it was scarce. CommonsEnt proposes the same move for the one piece of infrastructure the demand side has never had: a cheap, universal, principal-loyal way to coordinate people at scale.
Concretely, a coordination utility lets dispersed individuals act with the speed and unity that capital takes for granted. It lets a million buyers pool their demand and negotiate as one. It lets workers whose tasks are being automated coordinate a collective claim on the systems replacing them. It lets consumers run demand-side auctions in which sellers compete for aggregated purchasing power, rather than markets where isolated buyers face concentrated sellers. And it lets ownership of the new productive capital be pooled and recirculated broadly, so that the capital income which grows in the machine age flows to many rather than few.
None of this requires stopping or slowing the technology. Trajectory B is not anti-AI or anti-robotics; it embraces exactly the same productivity gains as Trajectory A. It changes only one thing — the price of coordinating people — and lets that single change propagate through the division of the surplus.
One might ask why this must be infrastructure rather than a set of policies — higher minimum wages, stronger unions, more redistribution. The answer is the asymmetry itself. Policies are downstream remedies that must be re-won every election against a coordinated opponent who never stops. Infrastructure changes the upstream conditions permanently. A union must be rebuilt in each workplace; a coordination utility, once it exists, is available to everyone everywhere at near-zero marginal cost, the way the internet is. It does not ask the fragmented side to out-organize the coordinated side by force of will. It hands them the missing tool and lets coordination become cheap as a standing fact of the economy.
Strip away the abstraction and picture an ordinary household. Today, when they face a large insurer, a hospital, a lender, or a landlord, they negotiate alone against an institution that has aligned thousands of people and algorithms against their single signature. With a coordination utility, that same household acts as one node in a body of millions: their demand is pooled with others, sellers bid for the aggregate, and the household receives the price a large, organized buyer commands rather than the price an isolated individual is offered. When their job is reshaped by automation, they are not left to absorb the shock privately; they hold, through the same utility, a recirculated stake in the productive systems of their economy, so that rising capital income reaches their account rather than only a distant shareholder's. None of this feels like an ideology or a movement. It feels like a service running quietly in the background, the way electricity does — present, reliable, and on their side. That is the test of real infrastructure: it disappears into ordinary life and simply makes the previously impossible routine.
It is worth being concrete about the channels through which a coordination utility changes the distribution, because "sharing" can sound vague or wishful. There are three, and each maps to an existing economic mechanism that simply becomes cheap when coordination becomes cheap.
First, bargaining power. When buyers and workers can coordinate instantly, prices and wages reflect a genuine negotiation rather than a standoff between concentrated sellers and atomized individuals. The surplus that currently accrues to whoever holds the coordinated position gets split closer to the middle. This alone shifts income toward the demand side without any change in ownership.
Second, demand aggregation. A coordination utility lets consumers combine their purchasing power and invite sellers to compete for it — a reverse of the usual arrangement. Aggregated demand is a powerful asset; today it is captured by platforms that sit between buyers and sellers and keep the value. Returned to the buyers themselves, it becomes a continuous discount on the cost of living, which matters most to the households who spend the largest share of their income.
Third, recirculated ownership. This is the deepest channel and the one that addresses the collapse of labor's share directly. If the income of the machine age is increasingly capital income, then broad prosperity requires broad ownership of capital. A coordination utility can pool small stakes into meaningful collective ownership of the productive systems — so that when a machine does a job, the return flows not to a distant owner alone but, in part, to the very people whose economy the machine serves. This converts the threat of automation into a dividend from it.
Notice that all three channels already exist in the economy. Bargaining, group buying, and shared ownership are not exotic. They are simply expensive to organize at scale today — available to those who can afford to coordinate, denied to those who cannot. The utility does not invent new economics. It removes the cost barrier that currently reserves these mechanisms for the already-powerful.
Because these channels keep the broad public attached to capital income, Trajectory B does not require labor's share of income to stay high to keep people prosperous. People can prosper through ownership even as the nature of work changes — which is the only durable answer to a world where machines do more of the labor. The next chart shows how differently labor's share can land when ownership is broad; recall the collapse under Trajectory A, and compare.
Everything above reduces to a single comparison: how each group's real income changes over the decade under each path. Laid side by side, the choice is stark and legible to anyone, regardless of economic training.
Read the rose bars first. Under the default path, roughly the bottom 80% of households — eight deciles, the large majority of the country — end the decade poorer in real terms, while the top decile, the top 1%, and the top 0.1% multiply their incomes. This is the asymmetry delivering its verdict: the coordinated few capture the machine age, the fragmented many pay for it.
Now the teal bars. Under the CommonsEnt path, every group gains. The proportional gains are largest where need is greatest, at the bottom, and they remain solidly positive all the way up. The visual asymmetry between the two sets of bars is the entire argument of this paper. Same technology. Same productivity. One variable changed — the cost of coordination — and the distribution of a civilization's wealth tips from concentration to breadth.
| Group | Trajectory A (default) | Trajectory B (CommonsEnt) | Swing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bottom decile (D1) | −5% | +58% | +63 pts |
| Middle (D3–D5) | −16% to −18% | +44% to +50% | ~+63 pts |
| Upper-middle (D8) | −2% | +38% | +40 pts |
| Top decile (D10) | +55% | +32% | −23 pts |
| Top 1% | +110% | +36% | −74 pts |
| Top 0.1% | +205% | +42% | −63 pts |
The table makes explicit a point worth dwelling on: in Trajectory B, even the top still grows. The top decile gains roughly a third in real terms; the top 1% and 0.1% do better than that. They gain less than in the runaway concentration of Trajectory A, but they gain — on a foundation, as the next section shows, far more stable than the one the default path offers them.
An economy where 80% of households lose income is an economy of shrinking markets. Concentration is not just unjust; past a point, it is bad business.
The instinctive reading of Trajectory A from the top is that concentration is good for capital — more of the pie, after all. But this ignores what a pie made of customers is. The income that flows to the bottom 80% does not vanish into a void; it is spent, and that spending is the revenue of nearly every business that sells to ordinary people. A future in which the broad public grows poorer is a future of contracting consumer demand, hollowing markets, and an economy increasingly dependent on selling luxury to the few.
Henry Ford understood this a century ago when he paid wages high enough that his workers could buy the cars they built. He was not being generous; he was building a market. The same logic scales to the machine age. The chart below traces broad consumer demand under each path.
Under the default path, as the majority's income erodes, aggregate demand stalls and then declines — a slow strangulation of the customer base on which most enterprises depend. Under the CommonsEnt path, broadly rising incomes mean a broadly growing market: more customers with more to spend, year after year. For most businesses — and for most investors holding diversified claims on the real economy rather than a narrow bet on monopoly rents — the larger, growing, more stable market of Trajectory B is the better environment, not the worse one.
The inequality between the two futures can also be read directly. The ratio between the average top-decile and bottom-decile household — a plain measure of how stratified the society is — diverges sharply.
A business class thinking one quarter ahead may prefer the concentration of Trajectory A. A business class thinking one decade ahead — about the stability of its markets, the legitimacy of the system that protects its property, and the social conditions under which enterprise is possible at all — has reason to prefer B. Extreme concentration has never been a stable equilibrium for long. It resolves, historically, through upheaval that is bad for everyone, including and especially the holders of concentrated wealth.
If Trajectory B is so clearly better for the overwhelming majority and tolerable even for the top, why is it not inevitable? Because of timing. A coordination utility can be built cheaply now, while the machine age is still forming and capital structure is still fluid. It becomes far harder to build later, once AI and robotics capital has concentrated and hardened the very asymmetry the utility was meant to correct.
The dynamic is a race between two curves. The feasibility of installing a fair coordination layer is highest now and declines as incumbents entrench — because a coordinated, capital-rich few will use their head start with the new technology to raise the barriers to any demand-side challenger, exactly as the asymmetry predicts. Meanwhile the cost and difficulty of building it rises along the same timeline. The two curves cross within a few years. After the crossing, Trajectory B does not become impossible, but it becomes a project of reversing entrenched power rather than shaping power still in formation — a vastly harder thing.
This is why the situation is urgent rather than merely important. The window is not open indefinitely. Every month the coordination asymmetry is left unaddressed, the coordinated side compounds its advantage with the new technology, and the cost of the demand side ever catching up rises. The machine age is being distributed now, in the architecture decisions and ownership structures being set this year and next. A coordination utility built in time shapes that distribution. One built late can only contest a distribution already set.
A case made only to the converted is worth little. Three serious objections deserve direct answers.
Almost certainly it will create some. The honest question is not whether new work appears but whether it appears fast enough, in the right places, and pays enough to offset what is displaced — and, crucially, who captures the gains in the meantime. Past technological waves did eventually generate new employment, but the transitions were often brutal and decades long for the people living through them, and the gains were divided by exactly the coordination asymmetry described here. Even in the optimistic case where ample new work emerges, the distribution of the transition's costs and benefits is still decided by who can coordinate. Trajectory B does not bet against new jobs; it ensures that whatever mix of old and new work the machine age produces, the broad public can claim a fair share of the surplus rather than absorbing the losses while others capture the gains.
The "lump of labor" fallacy — the assumption that there is a fixed amount of work to be done — has indeed misled many past predictions, and skepticism is warranted. But two things are different now. First, prior automation replaced specific muscles or specific calculations; general-purpose AI and dexterous robotics aim at the general human capacities of cognition and manipulation, narrowing the space of tasks that remain distinctively human. Second, and more important for this paper, the argument here does not actually depend on mass permanent unemployment. It depends only on the milder, well-evidenced claim — endorsed by the IMF and Goldman Sachs alike — that the technology will shift income from labor toward capital and worsen inequality unless something changes its distribution. That shift is already measurable. One need not predict an apocalypse to see the asymmetry at work.
No — and the distinction is the heart of the design. Central planning replaces markets with a central authority that decides outcomes. A coordination utility does the opposite: it leaves markets in place but corrects the imbalance of power within them, giving the demand side the same capacity to act in concert that the supply side already has. It is closer to antitrust, collective bargaining, or the cooperative movement than to a planned economy — mechanisms that operate through markets to make them function as competitive markets are supposed to. The utility issues no decrees and sets no prices; it lowers the cost for ordinary people to do together what they are already free to do alone. A market in which both sides can coordinate is more genuinely a market, not less.
This paper has spoken to three audiences at once, because the choice between these futures will be made by all three together.
To the intellectual class — economists, technologists, writers, researchers: the framing matters. As long as inequality is understood only as an outcome to be taxed and redistributed after the fact, the debate stays downstream of the cause. The cause is the coordination asymmetry, and the remedy is infrastructure that corrects it. Naming this clearly, modeling it rigorously, and subjecting the idea of a coordination utility to the hard scrutiny it deserves is the work that makes everything else possible. The scenarios in this paper are illustrative; the call is for the rigorous versions to be built and tested.
To the public — the eight deciles whom Trajectory A leaves behind: the machine age is not something happening to you from outside, to be passively endured. The single thing that decides whether it lifts you or sinks you is whether you can coordinate. That capacity is buildable. It has been expensive only because no one built the infrastructure to make it cheap. Demanding that infrastructure — treating coordination as a public utility you are owed, like clean water — is the most consequential political position available in this decade.
To the business class — the owners, founders, and investors: the long-horizon case for B is a case in your own interest. A broad, growing, stable market is worth more than a concentrated, shrinking one defended by ever-higher walls. The legitimacy of the system that protects enterprise depends on that system delivering for the many. You are better positioned than anyone to help build the coordination layer early, on terms that work, rather than to have a worse version imposed later amid the upheaval that extreme concentration reliably produces.
The machines are coming either way. The only question still open is whether the demand side gets the one tool it has always lacked — in time. That window is open now. It will not stay open long.
The two futures in this paper are not predictions. They are a choice, rendered in dollars and years so that the stakes cannot hide behind abstraction. One path lets an old asymmetry run to its conclusion. The other corrects it with infrastructure we already know how to build. The technology is identical in both. The difference is entirely a matter of whether we make coordination cheap before the window closes. We have, on current trends, only a few years to decide — and the deciding is done not in some future moment of reckoning, but in what we choose to build, and demand, starting now.
Baseline data: U.S. Census Bureau, Income in the United States: 2024 (P60-286); Congressional Budget Office, The Distribution of Household Income (2019, 2021); Saez & Zucman, income-composition and top-share series. Technology impact: International Monetary Fund, Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work (2024); Goldman Sachs Research, The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth and subsequent labor-market notes (2023–2026). Forward trajectories are illustrative scenarios constructed by the author to express the directional logic of each system; they are anchored to the cited baselines but are not forecasts. Coordination-asymmetry framing and the CommonsEnt coordination-utility concept are the author's. Charts marked "illustrative" use qualitative or scenario values; baseline charts use cited data.
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