Beyond AI Safety: Designing the Transition to an Intelligence Economy

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is increasingly discussed through the lenses of safety, capability and employment disruption. This report examines a broader question: how should economies, organisations and institutions adapt if machine intelligence becomes progressively more capable, scalable and economically consequential? It proposes an AI Transition Architecture connecting technological safety with human capability, workforce transition, economic participation, organisational adaptation, social resilience, institutional and legal adaptation, and international coordination. The analysis develops three diagnostic transition gaps—the AI Transition Gap, Governance Capability Gap and Economic Participation Gap—and examines how increasing AI capability may interact with labour markets, productivity, ownership, institutional competence and concentrations of technological, economic and political power. The report develops an integrated set of frameworks including a Six-Dimensional Concentration-Diffusion Model; Capability-Authority-Accountability; competence-floor subsidiarity; a Legislative Control Stack; Human Capability Stack; Automate-Augment-Reserve-Develop; Transition Financing Stack; Universal Economic Participation trigger system; and Human Prosperity Test. The central proposition is that AI should decentralise human capability faster than it centralises institutional power. Rather than treating its principal diagnoses as predetermined conclusions, the report specifies evidence and indicators capable of weakening or falsifying them. It draws on institutional, academic and frontier research current through August 2026 and distinguishes observed evidence from scenarios and normative recommendations. The report concludes that AI safety is essential but insufficient as a complete transition strategy. The wider challenge is architectural: designing institutions, economic mechanisms and capability systems through which increases in machine intelligence can contribute to broadly distributed human capability, agency, opportunity and prosperity while maintaining effective accountability and constraints on concentrated power.