When AI does the work,
what should happen to the job?

The US has 1,000 voters. Job protections, the income floor, the worker-household tax and the owner-household tax have separate ballots. A policy is stable when no single change can win 501 votes while the other decisions stay fixed. A package that changes several decisions together may still win.

Each voter is perfectly rational and self-interested. Voters know their order of exposure and compare ten years of expected income, discounted by 3% a year. Logarithmic utility makes an income loss more costly when income is already low. A 1% offset keeps utility finite at zero income; it adds no money to the budget. Job retention has no separate value beyond its income.

In international mode, the rest of the world acts as one decision-maker. It chooses its own complete policy, including AI deployment, to maximize the objective you select. A stable result requires both US ballot stability and a foreign best response. It does not require the foreign policy to win a US vote.

There may be several stable results or none. Voting details show the selection rule and any remaining challenge. An unstable fallback is not an equilibrium. Policies are fixed for ten years; repeated elections and renegotiation are outside this model.

Employers can lay off workers or retain obsolete roles at 50%, 100% or 125% of the starting wage before tax. These roles add no output. Employer payments come from capital income; finding new productive work is a separate transition.

The government can set a floor of 0%, 50% or 100% of the starting wage after household tax. It pays only the gap left by employer pay. A worker retained at full salary with a 50% worker tax keeps half that salary; a full income floor would require a government top-up of the other half.

The worker-household tax reaches wages, retention pay and worker-owned capital. The owner-household tax reaches the remaining owners’ capital income. Each rate can be 0%, 50% or 100%. Government transfers are exempt. Receipts fund the income floor first, then an equal dividend for every household, including owners. The floor excludes capital income and this dividend.

Employers and governments can run out of money. Voters compare actual payments after shortfalls. The equal dividend is an assumed spending rule. The policy menu does not reproduce the current US tax and benefit system.

Starting US output is 100: 60 goes to labor and 40 to capital. Workers receive all labor income and their chosen share of capital income. Changing the worker-owner ratio divides these starting incomes among different numbers of households.

International defaults use relative GDP and bilateral trade exposure. Both economies share the household mix, capital ownership and behavioral assumptions set by the sliders; their economic size, import exposure and frontier capability can differ. AI gains, displacement, return to work and responses to taxes remain adjustable assumptions. Zero foreign frontier capability leaves the foreign economy and its imports in place.

Taxes and required employer pay can slow AI investment and reduce productive effort. They can also erode existing capital capacity through an assumed 5% annual renewal requirement. This rate is a modeling choice, not an estimate from the cited data.

This is a finite policy comparison, not a full model of the world economy. It does not solve market prices, demand, debt, firms’ investment decisions or individual labor supply. It omits lobbying, monetary policy, AI safety and military outcomes. Changing the policy menu or voting procedure can change the result.

The pirate puzzle asks who can win enough votes to divide a fixed treasure. Automation changes how much is produced and who receives it. This simulator keeps the voting question and adds production, employment and government payments.