Intelligence Commons · Framework
Robot Remittances
The Work Contribution Continuity Framework
Inter Species Wisdom Project Inc. · A British Columbia Benefit Company
If AI replaces labour, the obligations of labour must follow the work.
The problem
Every hour of human work has historically carried obligations with it. A share went to income tax, a share to payroll contributions, a share to the public insurance that funds pensions, health, and the commons. As artificial intelligence and automation absorb the tasks that paid human workers used to perform, the work continues – but under prevailing law the obligations attached to it simply vanish. The output stays. The contribution disappears.
The result is not only the displacement of workers, but the quiet erosion of the public revenue base that displaced workers depend on – at precisely the moment demand for support rises. Most responses to AI-driven disruption focus downstream, on retraining and transition relief. Those matter. But they treat the symptom. The structural question – how does the obligation that used to follow the worker now follow the work? – remains largely unanswered by any concrete, debated mechanism.
What the WCCF is
The Work Contribution Continuity Framework is a single proposition with three moving parts.
The principle. If AI replaces labour, the obligations of labour must follow the work. The tax-and-contribution stream attaches to the job – the economic function being performed – not to the human being who used to perform it. When a function is automated, its continuity of contribution is preserved rather than extinguished.
The measure. This requires a new account: a way of recognising, inside the national accounts, the economic contribution of work itself – the work being done, by whomever or whatever does it – distinct from the wages that happen to be paid for it. The same institutional muscle that once built environmental accounts and well-being accounts from nothing can build this one.
The mechanism. “Robot remittances”: the orderly collection of the continued contribution at the point of the work, routed to the public insurance and commons that the displaced labour used to fund. The name is deliberately plain. This is not a tax on robots as objects. It is the continuity of an obligation that already existed, surviving the substitution of the worker.
Why now
Two facts are moving toward each other. The first is displacement: AI and automation are beginning to absorb tasks that, until now, only paid human workers could perform. The second is measurement. In May 2026 the United Nations’ High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP released “Counting What Counts,” the first global framework for measuring progress beyond gross domestic product. The premise is now mainstream: the numbers a society chooses to keep determine what it can see, and what it can govern. GDP was never built to see the contribution of work as such – only its market price. The WCCF sits exactly at that intersection.
How it is tested
The Intelligence Commons does not publish the WCCF as advocacy. It puts the framework through a three-round adversarial Hearing built for exactly this purpose – Direct, Cross-Examination, and Re-direct – producing a recorded panel finding of Certified, Failed, or Hung. In effect it is an evaluation rubric for a contested economic-policy claim: an independent, repeatable instrument that produces a documented, citable record of where a proposal survives scrutiny and where it breaks.
The WCCF Hearing is live, with credentialed participants on both sides. Robert D. Atkinson – founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and author of The Case Against Taxing Robots – has confirmed the Cross-Examination seat, agreeing to argue the case against on the record. A Hearing is only as strong as its opposition; that the leading critic of automation-era taxation has taken the chair is the integrity of the instrument in action.
The live docket – protocol in full, seats, documents, and findings as they are filed – is published here: Hearing #3 – Robot Remittances.
Participate
Economists, statisticians, and public-finance scholars are invited to file written submissions on either side, or to have published work cited into the documentary record. To file as affirmative speaker, cross-examiner, amicus, or witness, email the convener at [email protected] with the subject line “Hearing #3 – direct / cross / amicus / witness / submission.” All filings are public record.
Inter Species Wisdom Project Inc. · A British Columbia Benefit Company · intelligencecommons.ca · “Now that you know, what will you do?”
Leave a Reply