Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>For much of the twentieth century, advanced capitalist democracies stabilised economic growth through a labour-mediated accumulation regime linking mass employment, wage-based consumption, and welfare-state finance. The convergence of demographic ageing and artificial intelligence destabilises that historical configuration. Ageing populations, shrinking labour-force growth, and rising dependency burdens coincide with technological systems capable of substituting for cognitive and physical labour. Existing approaches within demographic economics, automation studies, and labour-market analysis address these developments separately. To integrate them, the article introduces the labour liability ratio (LLR), a heuristic framework that captures the relationship between labour’s contribution to output, demand formation, and fiscal capacity and the demographic, infrastructural, and dependency costs required to sustain labour-intensive societies. The article argues that advanced capitalist economies face compression of this ratio from both directions: labour-related costs rise while labour’s relative contribution weakens under advanced automation. It explores the possibility that demographic contraction may partially offset the disruptive effects of AI-driven labour substitution by reducing long-run labour-force growth and increasing capital deepening. This shift reconfigures political economy, raising questions of ownership, distribution, and technological surplus, alongside the global core-periphery divide. The article examines the political-economic implications of these developments for ownership, distribution, and technological sovereignty in increasingly automated economies.</p>