// ABOUT
What is the
Optional Work Index?
THE PREDICTION WE'RE TRACKING
BUILT AND MAINTAINED BY
Yaw Adom-Mensah - I am a Systems Engineer, Technologist, Researcher and Author. OptionalWork.com is a personal project to rigorously track one of the most consequential predictions of our time. This project shares the curiosity and spirit of The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972), one of the seminal works in systems dynamics, in its attempt to identify the behavioral tendencies and limits of the global system.
WHAT THE OWI IS
The Optional Work Index (OWI) is an algorithmic score from 0 to 100 measuring how close the world is to the conditions described in Musk's prediction. A score of 100 would mean work is genuinely optional for the majority of people.
The index is powered entirely by real economic data - no estimates, no fabricated numbers. Every component comes from a verifiable public source: the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve Economic Database (FRED), the World Bank, and live AI/robotics news scored by AI.
The score updates as new economic data and news signals become available throughout the day.
WHAT IT IS NOT
THE FIVE SUB-INDICES
Measures the advancing capability of AI systems - productivity growth, business investment in AI, and signals from unemployment data indicating cognitive automation.
Tracks physical automation via the gap between industrial output and manufacturing employment. When output rises while jobs fall, robots are doing the work.
Measures AI-driven productivity gains creating broadly shared material abundance - real GDP growth, disposable income, and global per-capita wealth.
Tracks structural displacement of human labor - declining labor force participation, falling job openings, and the automation gap between output and employment.
Measures whether AI productivity gains are reaching ordinary workers - real wage growth, the productivity-wage gap, and disposable income trends.
DATA SOURCES