THE REPUBLIC OF BELLWETHER
Department of AI
BELLWETHER
Your country
Choose a district to hear from its residents.
SKILLS TREE
Build your department
Choose a skill to see its benefits and requirements.
Start with 2 insight. Earn 1 after each year, except the final year. Learn before choosing a policy.
NATIONAL ACCOUNTS
How Bellwether is doing
Open a section for the numbers and their formulas.
Health, crime and population
Government & public budgets
Population & work
Economic sectors
Crime & public safety
How the simulation and score work
Bellwether, its people and all numerical rules are invented for this game. Outcomes illustrate policy tradeoffs; they are not forecasts for a real country.
AI deployment raises output more when literacy and trust support it. Automation creates displacement pressure, while skills and access support new opportunities. Education can pay off after one or two years. AI systems also incur annual maintenance costs. The journal separates those dynamics from your choices and random events.
Birth rate means births per 1,000 residents each year. It moves slowly with health, inclusion and employment security in this fictional model. Population reflects births, deaths and net migration. Neither birth rate nor population receives score points.
Five categories receive equal weight: prosperity, livelihoods, learning, public trust and resilience. The final score is 80% of their mean plus 20% of the weakest category. Prosperity maps an economy index of 60–180 to 0–100. Livelihoods average inclusion and 100 minus twice unemployment. Learning equals AI literacy. Public trust averages trust, health and a safety index that maps 200–1,600 modelled crime incidents per 100,000 to 100–0. Resilience averages preparedness and a fiscal buffer of twice treasury credits, capped at 100. Every category is bounded to 0–100.
Each year has a 45% chance of one of five events: storm, epidemic, cyberattack, export opportunity or research grant. The seed fixes the event calendar and severity, so replaying it lets you compare policies under the same shocks. Progress is saved only in this browser when storage is available.
Skills add the benefits shown in the tree: Worker transition multiplies future AI position losses by 0.85; Human capital strategy multiplies annual job opportunities by 1.25; Independent audits multiplies negative policy trust effects by 0.75; Accountable automation multiplies maintenance by 0.75. Cyber defence multiplies harmful cyber-event effects by 0.65, and Emergency logistics multiplies harmful storm and epidemic effects by 0.75. All are fictional game rules.
Teaching references: ILO: AI and occupational exposure · NIST: AI risk management. These inform the themes; they do not validate the game coefficients.
YOUR RECORD