Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg, this week:
All my shower thoughts now are about designing efficient workflows for synthesizing, collecting, labeling and annotating data.
Same. Since I started building every app and tool I thought would make my life easer, my workflow more efficient, I haven’t stopped. Apparently non-developers are now writing apps instead of buying them.
The assumed narrative is still AI displaces jobs, humans collect UBI, society figures out leisure. But the trajectory might be more work, not less.
The Jevons paradox is 160 years old: when James Watt made steam engines more efficient, coal consumption didn’t fall. It exploded. Efficiency made coal useful in new ways. Satya Nadella has referenced this for AI. Erik Brynjolfsson argues it applies to AI-augmented occupations—coders, radiologists, translators. Make something more efficient and you find more things to do.
When I can build an app in a weekend that used to take months, I don’t build one. I build six. When I can write a report in an hour, I write five. The friction that protected us from infinite expectations evaporates.
Keynes predicted a 15-hour work week by now. We got the productivity gains. We work longer hours than ever. When capability expands, so does the definition of “enough.” The bar rises.
If AI makes me 10x more productive, that’s not 10x more free time. That’s 10x more I could be doing. In a competitive environment—founding, climbing, anything with stakes—someone who uses that 10x while I rest will outrun me.
More capability means more possibility. But we should know where this points. The fear was displacement. The reality might be inescapability.
Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill time available. The AI corollary: productivity expands to fill capabilities available.