Working Paper v13 · March 2026
Transmutarianism.
A framework that does for relational work what dollars do for goods: it counts what people absorb and emit to each other across care, harm, safety, and dignity. The Foundation is publishing it so the contributions productivity metrics ignore can be seen alongside output.
The Problem
Economies measure throughput. They do not measure transmutation.
Productivity captures how much an agent moves through a system. It captures nothing about who absorbs deprivation, who emits fulfillment, or how relational value flows through families, organizations, and neighborhoods. The work of cycle-breakers stays invisible to the books: the parent who experienced abuse and raised a child with care, the organizer who turns scarcity into belonging, the peer who reverses an overdose at three in the morning.
AI alignment inherits a parallel exclusion. RLHF preference data comes from convenience samples of annotators. Constitutional AI is sourced from participants screened for technological literacy. The populations most affected by AI-mediated decisions are absent from every process that determines what AI should value.
Headline finding
43% of 51 DTES residents named compassion, care, or kindness as the primary value AI should learn from human beings. The same category was absent from the 81,000-person Anthropic survey on what people want from AI, and absent from the 58 principles of Anthropic's in-house standard constitution.
Source: Geraskin & Ai (2026), Whose Values Train AI?The Three Pillars
01 / THEORY
The Framework
Transmutarianism v13 evaluates moral work as the ratio between what an agent absorbs and what they emit, across hierarchically-weighted human need dimensions. The Conduit (deterministic passthrough) is the morally neutral baseline. Transmutation is deviation from baseline that requires explanation.
Read the framework →02 / EVIDENCE
The Evidence
51 trauma-informed interviews in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, March 2026. Headline numbers, eight Community Ethical Wisdom Themes, pseudonymized participant voices, a 130-node relational network, flows of fulfillment and deprivation plotted along Maslow levels.
See the findings →03 / INFRASTRUCTURE
The Foundation
Economy of Wisdom Foundation publishes the framework and builds the infrastructure that operationalizes it. Sigil.bot for attribution receipts. Wisdom Wallet for banking that survives the institution that issues it.
See the roadmap →The Economic Case
AI displaces conventional knowledge work by roughly 3.4 percent of US employment by 2035. The work it cannot do is relational. The market for that work does not yet exist because the measurement infrastructure for it does not yet exist.
Source: Metaculus Labor Automation Forecasting Hub (2026). Read the full case at /economic-case/.Four Use Cases
CITY
Smart cities as transmutation accounting layers
Capital is moving from office floor space to data centers. As jobs stop anchoring residents to cities, the new attractor is fulfillment infrastructure: housing, food, third places, community. Layer (τ, F, A, D) accounting on top of existing sensor telemetry so the city can score and improve what now does the attracting.
DISCOURSE
Discourse as a measurable flow
Public discourse plotted on Amplification by Degradation. Click eight historical exemplar debates. Score your own text. Live tool at /discourse-evaluator/.
COMMUNITY
Flows of fulfillment and deprivation through communities
The DTES 130-node network as a replication template. 78 pseudonymized individuals, 37 organizations, 8 systemic nodes, plus 7 unnamed roles. The extraction gradient mapped end-to-end.
INSTITUTION
Auditing anchor tenants on the transmutation quadrant
A methodology any community can run on a hyperscale tenant, real-estate developer, utility, or any institution whose footprint dominates a neighbourhood. Per-Maslow F/A scoring, the six-input audit protocol, and three policy levers. Worked example: the Foundation's Telus Sovereign AI Factory Vancouver evaluation.
Published by
Economy of Wisdom Foundation
Transmutarianism is one of the Foundation's three pillars (theory, evidence, infrastructure). The Foundation is Vancouver-based, self-funded, and seeking institutional and private partners.
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