By Ali Katz
The question AI is forcing us to answer
For the last century, we have measured economic health mostly by asking one question: how much did we produce and sell?
That is what Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was built to count. It counts market activity. It counts goods and services exchanged for money. It counts the transactions that move through the visible economy.
But it does not count the work that makes life possible.
It does not count the mother awake at 3:00 a.m. with a sick child. It does not count the adult daughter managing her father's medication schedule. It does not count the neighbor who brings food after a death, the friend who listens someone back to life, the elder who holds a family together, the community member who notices who is missing and goes to check.
That work is not marginal. It is foundational.
And as artificial intelligence begins to reduce the number of traditional jobs human beings are needed to perform, we are going to be forced to answer a deeper question:
If jobs are no longer the primary way humans prove their value and receive compensation, what standard will we use instead?
My answer is simple:
We need to move from an economy that rewards production to an economy that rewards care.
Let's call it the caring economy.
GDP was never designed to measure human wellbeing
This is not a new critique. Economists have been warning for years that GDP is too narrow to serve as the primary scoreboard for a society.
The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission, later expanded through OECD's Beyond GDP work, put it plainly: what we measure affects what we do. If we measure the wrong thing, we do the wrong thing. If we fail to measure something, it becomes neglected as if it does not exist. GDP was not designed to measure general welfare, wellbeing, distribution, sustainability, or the non-market activities that hold life together.
In other words, GDP is not wrong because it measures market activity.
It is wrong when we mistake market activity for value.
A society can grow its GDP while its families collapse, its elders are abandoned, its children are underheld, its caregivers burn out, and its communities become lonelier. GDP can rise while life gets worse.
That should tell us something.
The problem is not only economic. It is moral. We have built a measurement system that treats care as invisible unless it becomes a paid service. If I care for my own mother, GDP sees nothing. If I pay someone else to care for her, GDP records economic growth.
Same care. Different accounting.
That is the distortion.
Charles Eisenstein has written extensively about the negative consequences of an economic system built on artificial scarcity that compels the monetization of life and obscures the value of our sacred gifts in his book, Sacred Economics.
Tenzin Seldon names this measurement failure from the climate and capital side. In an April 2026 guest commentary for Aspen Daily News, Seldon argues that the global economy needs to shift from Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to Gross Domestic Regeneration (GDR). GDP asks how fast a country produces. GDR asks whether a country is actually regenerating across three dimensions: ecological regeneration, social regeneration, and capital regeneration.
That framing belongs in this conversation because care is social regeneration. A society that cares for children, elders, families, land, water, and community trust is not merely being kind. It is rebuilding the living systems that make any economy possible.
If GDP is the old scoreboard, GDR is one possible new scoreboard. And the caring economy is the human and relational layer inside that broader regenerative shift.
The hidden economy is already enormous
The care economy is not a small sentimental add-on to the real economy. It is the hidden foundation underneath it.
The care economy includes both paid care work, which is often underpaid, and unpaid care work, which is often not counted at all.
The International Labour Organization estimates that 16.4 billion hours are spent in unpaid care work every day. That is the equivalent of 2 billion people working eight hours a day with no pay. If valued at an hourly minimum wage, that work would amount to 9 percent of global GDP, or roughly $11 trillion in purchasing power parity terms.
Women do most of it. Globally, women perform 76.2 percent of unpaid care work, more than three times men's share.
UN Women puts the point even more directly: unpaid care work is invisible in GDP and overlooked by governments, even though women do more than half of the world's work, and nearly half of that work goes unpaid. In some countries, if women's unpaid work were given monetary value, it would exceed 40 percent of GDP.
This means we are not talking about a niche policy issue. We are talking about a vast sector of human contribution that already exists, already powers the economy, and is already being counted on by everyone, just not compensated.
The caring economy begins by telling the truth: Care is work. Care creates value. Care must be measured and resourced.
AI is breaking the old bargain
AI will break the old bargain that was clear for generations: get educated, get a job, earn income, support yourself and your family.
That bargain was already failing before AI. Wages stagnated. Housing costs exploded. Healthcare became unaffordable for many. People worked more and felt less secure.
Now AI is accelerating the failure of the bargain. AI is not creating this question; it is making it impossible to ignore.
The IMF has warned that AI could affect about 40 percent of jobs globally, and closer to 60 percent in advanced economies. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects major labor market churn by 2030: 170 million new jobs created, 92 million displaced, and a net increase of 78 million jobs. Even if the net number looks positive, the lived reality will be disruption, displacement, retraining, and insecurity for millions of people.
The point is not that every job disappears tomorrow. The point is that the job can no longer be the only bridge between human value and human survival.
If AI can perform more of the productive tasks we used to pay people to do, then we have two choices.
We can try to preserve a dying system by forcing people to compete for fewer and stranger jobs. Or we can redesign the economy around the forms of human value AI cannot replace: presence, discernment, relational intelligence, eldering, parenting, mentoring, healing, community tending — care.
A three-layer model: being, care, and solutions
This is where Universal Basic Income (UBI) enters the conversation, though I do not think UBI alone is enough.
UBI answers one question: what is the basic floor of dignity every human should have simply because they are alive?
That floor matters. In an AI economy, every person should have access to the basics of life without having to prove their usefulness to a labor market that may no longer need them.
That means healthcare, shelter, water, food, basic safety, and basic participation in community. These are not rewards for productivity. They are the foundation of human life.
So the base pays for being. But UBI alone is incomplete.
A basic income can prevent destitution. It does not create meaning, contribution, belonging, or recognition. It does not tell us what kind of participation we want to reward above the floor. It doesn't reward people who love to earn and strive, and deserve to be rewarded for their additional efforts and contributions to society.
That is why the caring economy needs three layers. I'll write about it here using the concept of points rather than dollars, or any other currency, to remove the emotionality that can come when we discuss these things in terms of money. For now, let's just consider this caring economy to operate within the context of rewards points.
The question of how the points are funded, and what body or institution issues the points, will be the topic for a future article. Do your best not to get hung up there, and instead focus on an economic model that rewards being, care and solutions.
Layer one: basic needs met for being
The first layer says every human life has inherent dignity.
You do not earn food by being useful. You do not earn water by being productive. You do not earn shelter by winning the market's approval. You receive the basics because you are alive.
Layer two: additional points for providing care
The second layer says the work of caring for each other has economic value and should be recognized, measured, and rewarded.
In this model, people earn additional points by providing care. Those points can then be exchanged for the upgrades of life: better food, better housing, healing experiences, education, retreats, travel, cultural experiences, and the forms of beauty and nourishment people want beyond basic survival.
The point is not to make care transactional. The point is to stop pretending care has no value simply because it has traditionally been given by women for free.
Care becomes the bridge between basic dignity and a more abundant life. In the caring economy, do a good deed for a family member or a neighbor, and get points.
Layer three: more points for solving what the collective needs
The third layer rewards people who create solutions needed by the collective.
Christopher Life, founder of United Independents, has called this solutionism, and I think that word matters. Solutionism is not hustle culture. It is not extraction with better branding. It is the next level of contribution after basic care: seeing what the collective needs, building a response, and making that response available in a way that benefits the whole.
At the third layer, people earn more points, more access, and more experiences by creating solutions that reduce suffering, increase resilience, and help the community function better.
Eventually, when someone has maxed out the points they could receive (or the experiences they could have) through providing care and creating solutions, the next step is not endless accumulation. The next natural step would be leadership.
That is the capstone of the model. The purpose of earning more is not to separate yourself further from others. The purpose is to become more responsible for the whole.
Imagine if we had an economy in which the ultimate reward was true servant stewardship across the board.
What compensation for care could look like
We do not have to invent everything from scratch. Pieces already exist.
Some countries use care credits in pension systems, recognizing that people who leave or reduce paid employment to care for children, elders, or disabled family members should not be punished in retirement for doing socially necessary work.
Time banks allow people to exchange hours of service outside the market, often treating one hour of care as equal to one hour of any other contribution. The Stanford Social Innovation Review has described time banking as powerful precisely because it rejects market price as the exclusive measure of value.
Caregiver tax credits, paid family leave, child allowances, long-term care benefits, and public investment in childcare and eldercare are all partial expressions of the same principle: care is infrastructure.
But the caring economy would go further. It would treat care as a core economic indicator, not a side benefit. It would ask every community, city, state, and nation: Are basic needs actually being met? How much care is being given? Who is giving it? Who is receiving it? Where is care abundant? Where is care missing? Who is carrying too much without support? What solutions are needed by the collective? Who is creating those solutions? Who is ready to step into leadership?
And then it would resource the people and systems answering those questions.
The danger of making care too transactional
There is a trap here.
The moment we try to compensate care, we risk turning care into another transaction. We risk building an app that asks people to log acts of kindness, score each other, perform generosity for credits, and submit human tenderness into a surveillance economy.
That is not what I mean.
Care cannot be reduced to a spreadsheet. It can be supported by systems, but it cannot be fully captured by them.
A caring economy must be designed with humility. It must recognize that much of care is felt before it is measured. The mother knows. The elder knows. The grieving friend knows. The body knows when it has been cared for.
So the standard cannot be only mechanical.
A real caring economy would need both measurement and discernment. Data and community validation. Public policy and local trust. Resources and relationship.
This is where feminine intelligence — not as gender essentialism but as embodied relational knowing — must be part of economic design.
The current economy was largely designed around the measurable, the extractable, and the productive. The next economy must be designed around the living.
The shift we need now
The AI era is going to expose a truth that has always been there: jobs were never the same as value. Employment was one way we distributed money. It was never an adequate measure of human contribution.
As AI takes over more tasks, our choice is not whether to value care. We already depend on it. Our choice is whether to continue extracting it for free or build an economy that tells the truth about it.
That means moving beyond GDP as the primary scoreboard. It means measuring wellbeing, trust, time, care, belonging, ecological health, and family resilience. It means building a dignity floor through UBI or something like it. It means compensating care above that floor. It means recognizing that the future economy cannot be built only around productivity, because productivity without care produces burnout, loneliness, and collapse.
The economy of the future must answer a different question. Not only: what did we produce? But also: how well did we care for each other?
That is the question AI is forcing us to ask. And it may be the question that saves us.
Sources and further reading
OECD, Beyond GDP: Measuring What Counts for Economic and Social Performance (2018): link
Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission, Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (2009): link
International Labour Organization, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work (2018): link
ILOSTAT, Measuring unpaid domestic and care work: link
UN Women, What is unpaid care work and how does it power the economy?: link
IMF, AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let's Make Sure It Benefits Humanity (2024): link
World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025: link
Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Time Bank Solution: link
Tenzin Seldon, Seldon: New systems needed to fight climate change, Aspen Daily News (Apr. 22, 2026): link
European Commission, Study supporting the monitoring of care credits in occupational pension schemes: link