The Optional Work Index.
A national measure of how far work has become optional: the point at which machine capability can carry the economy's work, weighed against how much human work the economy still demands.
How optional is work, and for whom?
Every debate about AI and work eventually collapses into the same argument: machines are coming for jobs, or they are not; work will end, or it will simply change. The debate stays circular because the underlying question has never been made measurable.
The Optional Work Index makes it measurable. OWI treats a national economy as a system with two coupled subsystems: a supply side — the capacity of machines, capital, and automation to perform the economy's work — and a demand side — the extent to which the economy still requires human labor for its output, income, and institutions. Neither side alone answers the question. The index is the interaction of the two.
The result is a single, comparable signal per country: how far along the path from necessary work to optional work that economy actually is — not in rhetoric, but in structure.
A two-sided construct, joined by a geometric mean.
OWI is built as a systems-science instrument, not a scoreboard. The full methodology is documented in the working paper; the architecture is simple to state.
Machine work supply
The economy's capacity for machine-performed work: automation depth, AI capability diffusion, compute and capital intensity, and the infrastructure that lets machine work substitute for human work at scale.
Human work demand
How much the economy still requires human labor — the structure of income, the composition of output, and the institutional arrangements that keep human work necessary rather than chosen.
Geometric mean
The two subsystems are joined by a geometric mean, so neither side can compensate for the other. High machine capability with rigid human-work demand does not make work optional. Both conditions must move.
Published method
Every input, weight, and transformation is documented in the open. The conclusions should survive scrutiny, not depend on the absence of it.
The formal treatment.
The academic working paper formalizes OWI as a two-sided systems-science construct, situates it in the systems literature — from general systems theory to system dynamics — and specifies the full measurement model.
Institutions interested in the methodology, in replication, or in commissioning country deep-dives can request the paper directly from the research team.
Built for the institutions setting work policy.
Workforce and transition policy
A defensible baseline for where the national economy sits on the machine–human balance, and a way to track whether policy is moving it.
Cross-country comparison
One comparable construct across economies at very different stages — the precondition for any serious international conversation about the future of work.
An open construct to test
A published methodology designed to be challenged, extended, and replicated — with OWI-C, the company index, serving firms directly.