What arrives
Displacement that does not come as one event. Cognitive automation closes the bottom rungs of office careers; robots close the physical fallback; buyouts and hiring freezes thin payrolls without a single plant closing. Each step is small. Together they leave a large share of people earning less than they need, many of them not counted as unemployed.
The capability pages that drive it: automating cognitive work and robots and physical work.
What must exist first
Floor credits, partial and rising, reaching every person every month.
- A first credit, paid to everyone. Small at first, never tied to losing a job, never reduced by earnings.
- A ratchet. The credit rises with the public share and never falls back.
- The floor measure. A published standard, priced in real goods and indexed by region, that says what the full floor will be (the floor measure).
- Today’s supports folded in. Guaranteed incomes, housing guarantees, and basic services counted as paths toward the credit, not replaced overnight.
- Benefits decoupled from jobs. Healthcare and retirement that survive losing work.
The floor arrives in stages, each universal within its scope and never tested against earnings: continuity and the public builder; the full child floor; the elder floor; the adult food and mobility parts; and the housing part as floor homes are built. Signs of displacement can bring a stage forward in a region, and no stage goes back (where the money comes from).
Why it is cheaper first
A ratchet must begin before need is acute. A partial credit paid while most people still work costs little, and those people help shape its rules. A full floor built in a hurry after the wave costs everything at once, and is shaped by whoever offers the rescue. People who are already afraid for their survival trade rights for security; people with a floor under them can refuse.
Readiness states
| State | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Started | a floor law passed, or a first partial credit paid to everyone in a region |
| In place | credits reaching everyone monthly, rising on a published schedule |
| Tested | a large wave of exits absorbed with hardship holding flat |
What to start now
Begin with the failures people already find absurd: healthcare lost with a job, an address needed to get the job that pays for the address. Fold existing guaranteed-income pilots toward the credit. Publish the floor measure for a first set of regions, so the target is known before the money is.
Where it is worked out
- The floor: what the floor guarantees
- The standing transition: how the floor arrives in phases
- Writing circulation into the rules: rule 2, a floor no one can withdraw, and rule 10, a floor beyond reach