We Are Due for a Revolution. New Hampshire Wrote the Lawful One Into Its Constitution in 1784.

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Software is learning to pay people the least they will take, Congress is passing laws at a historic crawl, and workers just got their smallest share of business output on record. Either we rewrite the rules and spread the ownership, or we end up fighting each other over scraps.

Full disclosure: this is a signed opinion column, and it is a prediction, not a report of something that has happened. The books named below are mine. The two proposed constitutions it links to are my own drafts, written as public argument. They are not law, not filings, and not bills before any legislature.

The Labor Department published a number in September that should have led every newscast in New Hampshire. In the second quarter of 2026, the share of business output paid to the people who did the work fell to 52.8 percent. The government has tracked that figure since 1947. It has never been lower.

Set it next to the Federal Reserve’s own ledger. At the middle of this year, the richest 1 percent of American households held 32.5 percent of the country’s household net worth. The entire bottom half of the country held 2.3 percent. When the Fed’s series begins, in 1989, those numbers were 22.8 and 3.5. The top has been climbing for a generation, and the bottom has been sinking with it.

I think we are due for a revolution, and I think artificial intelligence is going to push us into it. I do not mean the kind with muskets. I mean the kind New Hampshire wrote into Part First, Article 10 of its constitution in 1784: when government stops serving the whole community, the people may reform the old one or build a new one. We can take that road on purpose, with ballots and new law. Or we can pretend the current model holds until the day it doesn’t, and then fight each other over what is left. I don’t see a third road, and I don’t think we have long to choose.

Related GSR coverage: Nobody Can Count the Laws You’re Presumed to Know sizes up the rulebook. New Hampshire Taxes Payroll. AI Is Coming for the Payroll. shows what automation does to the state budget. A New Constitution for New Hampshire. Another for the United States. holds the full proposals argued for below. The Freedom to Starve covers the state wage floor; it cites different federal data, so its figures and these are not directly comparable.

A machine that learns your floor

For most of history, setting a wage was a crude act. A boss guessed. A union pushed back. One posted rate applied to everybody on the shift. That crudeness protected working people, because it meant the employer could not see exactly how desperate any one of them was.

Software can see it. Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, spent years studying ride-hail drivers and published what she found in the Columbia Law Review in 2023. She named the practice algorithmic wage discrimination. Two people doing much the same job get different hourly pay, and the rate is recomputed constantly from data on where each one is, how each one behaves, and how busy the market is. Under that model, she wrote, workers can be paid “as little as the system determines that the workers may be willing to accept.”

Read that line twice. A system that measures how little you will accept is a system built to find your floor and then live on it. Here is my blunter version, and it is my opinion, not her finding. The math gets good enough to pay a person exactly enough to keep from giving up, and not a dollar more. Keep him alive, keep him hoping, keep him clocking in. Every improvement in AI makes that math cheaper and more precise. Nobody has to be a villain for this to happen. The software only has to be aimed at the margin, and the margin is where most of us live.

Who keeps the gains

The labor share has been sliding for decades. Artificial intelligence did not start that slide. It is a faster tool for doing what the economy was already doing, which is moving income out of paychecks and into ownership.

The people paid to measure this risk are not shy about it. The International Monetary Fund estimated in 2024 that about 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies like ours are exposed to AI, and its managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, wrote that in most scenarios the technology “will likely worsen overall inequality.”

The first hard evidence is landing on the young. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, working from payroll records, reported in August that employment for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed jobs trails its expected path by about 19 percent, measured against people the same age in less-exposed work. The losses cluster in jobs where AI automates the task. The same researchers say plainly that they see no widespread, economy-wide displacement yet, and that their numbers describe patterns rather than prove cause. I respect that caution. I also know that a flood starts as water in the basement.

Daron Acemoglu, the MIT economist who shared the 2024 Nobel prize in economics for his work on how institutions shape prosperity, makes a version of this argument careful enough that business schools invite him to give it. In the short Harvard Business School interview below, he warns that rushing AI out through a handful of large tech companies tends to overrate the machine and underrate the worker, and he argues that a path where both do well still exists. I agree with him on both counts. The second half of that sentence is the whole reason to write this column.

Too many laws, and a Congress that cannot keep up

Now the rules. In May 2025, the White House put a confession into Executive Order 14294: the Code of Federal Regulations runs past 48,000 sections and 175,000 pages, and the order admits nobody can say how many separate crimes are buried inside it, probably not even the Justice Department. You are still presumed to know every one of them. I spent a whole book, Malice Not Required, on what that pile does to ordinary people who never meant to break anything. It is written. I have not released it yet.

Most of that rulebook was written for a world of filing cabinets and a workforce that showed up in person. The laws that would matter in a world of pay algorithms and automated decisions mostly do not exist. We have too many laws and the wrong ones.

And the body that could fix it moves at the speed of committee. The 119th Congress had passed 117 laws as of September, according to USAFacts, the second-fewest at that point in any term since 1973. The average since 1981 is 453 per two-year term. Meanwhile, the evaluation group METR found that the length of tasks AI agents can finish on their own doubled about every seven months across the six years it studied, through early 2025. One of those lines is accelerating.

Washington has no national AI statute. In December 2025, the president signed Executive Order 14365, which set up a Justice Department task force to challenge state AI laws and asked for a legislative proposal that would preempt the ones that conflict with it. A bipartisan House group released a draft in June, but according to a CASRAI tracker dated Sept. 20, it was a discussion draft, never filed as a bill. So the federal posture today is to discourage states from writing AI rules while passing none of its own. Granite Staters should not wait on that.

My prediction

Here is where I think this goes if nothing changes. The profit motive as we have built it cannot survive artificial intelligence, because every firm’s rational move is to cut the payroll that its customers live on. I laid that argument out at book length in The Obsolescence Engine, and the short version is that capitalism as currently wired ties survival to a wage, and AI is built to make the wage optional. Somebody will own the machines. The only question is whether that somebody is a thin slice of households or the rest of us.

I don’t expect Washington to move until the generation that holds most of the country’s wealth hands it down. The Fed’s figures show baby boomers held 52.5 percent of household net worth at mid-year, more than every younger generation combined. I wrote about how that came to be in The Boomer Receipt. That is not a wish. It is a guess about how slowly power changes hands, and I hope I am wrong.

What I fear is the other path. A country that concentrates wealth this hard, while it tells the people at the bottom to retrain and be patient, stops being a peaceful country. I am not calling for that. I am warning about it, the way you warn a neighbor about a dead tree leaning over his roof.

New Hampshire has been here before. When Lewis Hine photographed girls walking out of the Amoskeag mills in Manchester in 1909, the market was not about to grow a conscience. Law changed it. Reformers like the committee that sent Hine into those mills pushed for decades, and in 1938 Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which banned oppressive child labor in the industries it covered and set the first national minimum wage at 25 cents an hour. That was a revolution too. It was done with votes.

The revolution this state already wrote down

You do not have to borrow the word from anybody. It is in our founding document, under its own heading.

Look at who the framers named as the danger: any one man, family, or class. They were not writing about kings alone. They were writing about whoever bends the government toward private gain.

In September I published two proposed constitutions built on that idea, one for New Hampshire and one for the United States. The state draft gives every person a right to algorithmic due process: notice that a machine made the call, plain reasons, the facts it used, and review by a human who can overrule it. It says that when automation displaces work here on a large scale, the legislature has a duty to provide for the people displaced. The federal draft reaches the extraordinary gains of automation and public data with fair taxation, for the general welfare. Tear them apart. That is why they are public. New Hampshire puts the question of a constitutional convention on the ballot every ten years; voters turned it down by roughly two to one in 2022, and it comes back in 2032. Six years is enough time to argue it out properly.

What I want, starting now

None of this needs a convention to begin. The General Court could start in January.

• Sunset the pile. Every rule that carries a criminal penalty gets an expiration date and has to be justified again to survive. Fewer laws, written for the world we live in.
• Same work, same posted rate. No paying two people differently for the same task based on a profile of how desperate each one is, and every pay formula open to the worker it governs.
• Algorithmic due process. No benefit, license, job, or liberty taken by a machine without notice, reasons, and a human with the power to say no.
• Ownership, not crumbs. Alaska paid every eligible resident $1,200 this fall out of a fund the public owns. New Hampshire could build its own stake in the gains of automation and pay every resident a share, instead of watching its payroll-based business tax erode.
• Raise the floor. New Hampshire’s minimum wage is still the federal $7.25. A state that leaves its floor there while software learns to pay at the floor has picked a side.

The machine is not the enemy

I am not against artificial intelligence. I use it every day to do this work, and I have said so in print. The same Stanford study that found the damage to young workers found the other side too: where AI helps people do their jobs instead of replacing them, employment held steady or grew. That is the fork. Pointed at the margin, these tools squeeze people. Pointed at the work, they free people to do more of it, better, for everybody.

We can fix this together. But right now we are letting people suffer more than we have to, and calling it the market. This website exists so I can say what I see coming while there is still time to change it, and so the most sensible voices in this state can find each other and get louder. Congress adapts at the speed of committee. The work machines can do on their own has been doubling every seven months. New Hampshire gave its people the right to reform their own government before the United States existed. Use it, while it is still a choice.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. This is a signed opinion column. Its predictions are the author’s; every factual claim is listed in the fact-check table with its source, and claims resting on secondary trackers are marked ATTRIBUTED. The two charts are original Granite State Report graphics built from federal data downloaded Oct. 17, 2026. The Federal Reserve revises its distributional accounts each quarter, so earlier GSR figures for the same series may differ slightly. Malice Not Required is unreleased. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when. See the corrections policy.