CONCEPT
The Distributional Audit
Cowen's proposed governance mechanism: the systematic accounting of who captures the benefits and who absorbs the costs of an AI-augmented workflow, extended across the entire cognitive supply chain.
The distributional audit is Cowen's concrete proposal for making the invisible visible. Every organization deploying AI tracks productivity metrics — features shipped, code committed, revenue generated. These are the benefits side of the ledger. The costs side is systematically absent: hours of sleep lost, domestic labor displaced, cognitive reserves depleted, lateral friction redistributed onto partners and children, global annotation labor extracted, energy consumed. A distributional audit tracks both sides. It does not produce guilt; it produces information — the same kind of information that environmental impact assessments produce for physical infrastructure. The audit asks: who benefited from this quarter's productivity gains? Who absorbed the costs? Are the costs distributed equitably across the organization and its supply chain, or are they concentrated on the workers with the least power to refuse them?
In The You On AI Field Guide
The proposal has direct precedent in environmental and social impact assessment regimes. Before a new port can be built, environmental impact assessments are legally required in