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Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective
As our productivity increases, our standards and expectations rise even faster, creating a psychological Jevons Paradox that threatens to consume our humanity in the pursuit of ever-greater output. We become victims of our own efficiency.
Tina He • Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective
Expectations grow faster than wages. Expectations grow at the speed of information, wages grow at the speed of prediction, and fast learners are exploited in the wage system, because they are doing more and more for less and less because the value of currency in terms of buying power is going down and people with wages aren’t paying attention to money at the same level of detail.
This is the paradox of our time: the very tools designed to free us from labor are trapping us in an endless cycle of escalating work.
Tina He • Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective
Yes.
Our metrics of progress have continuously abstracted: from the tangible bushels of wheat in agricultural economies (with natural physical limits), to industrial-era efficiency metrics (units/hour, machine uptime), to the nebulous productivity measures of knowledge work. Each evolution has moved us further from human-scaled, naturally bounded metric... See more
Tina He • Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective
Traditional economics might predict that AI-boosted productivity would reduce working hours, a four-day weekend for tasks that once took five days. But reality has different plans. We're witnessing what I call the "labor rebound effect"—productivity doesn't eliminate work; it transforms it, multiplies it, elevates its complexity. The time saved bec... See more
Tina He • Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective
What happens when the consensual vision around how AI minimizes work time and maximizes leisure time is in fact, wrong. And what happens in reality, when those that are already productive, only work so much more? And as individuals become much more empowered, how does one stop oneself from working, that now the opportunity cost of not working becom... See more
Tina He • Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective
what a provocative statement: “AI makes the opportunity cost of not working almost infinite” because as computing becomes cheaper, possibilities multiply