An interactive mechanism
The Ouroboros
Firms pay wages; households spend them; the spending is the firms’ revenue. As companies automate cognitive labour to save through compute, they are also thinning out their own consumer base — the system starts eating its own tail. Drag the slider. Watch profits rise first. Then watch the ring starve. Then break the circuit.
Share of the wage bill replaced by compute. Compute is cheaper — and spends nothing.
Taxes automation profits and recirculates them as household income — the floor, not the house.
Firm revenue
100
Consumer demand
100
Household income
62
Firm profit
38
An illustrative mechanism, not a forecast: a four-variable toy of the displacement-consumer loop argued in the Cultural Alignment paper. The point is structural — whatever the parameters, compute does not shop.