CONCEPT
The Capability Distribution Indicator
The proposed dashboard metric that would track not merely income distribution but capability distribution — who has access to AI tools, who is being augmented, who is being displaced — a framework that reveals distributional effects invisible to income-based inequality metrics.
The fourth of Coyle's proposed dashboard indicators is distributional — not merely of income, which existing metrics track, but of capability. Who has access to AI tools? Who is being augmented, and who is being displaced? Is the capability expansion reaching populations that most need it, or is it concentrating among those already advantaged? Coyle's concern about AI monopolization — her call for a CERN for generative AI, her advocacy for interoperability principles borrowed from telecoms regulation — reflects the conviction that the distributional dimension of the transition is as important as aggregate productivity, and that aggregate metrics conceal distributional reality.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework draws directly on Amartya Sen's capability approach: economic development should be evaluated by what people are able to do and be, not merely by what they consume. The capability distribution indicator translates this philosophical framework into a measurable