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 easier, my workflow more efficient, I haven’t stopped. Apparently non-developers are now writing apps instead of buying them. This is the AI productivity paradox in miniature: the tools get better and we do more, not less.
The assumed narrative is still AI displaces jobs, humans collect UBI, society figures out leisure. But the trajectory might be more work, not less. A recent NBER study found that workers in AI-exposed occupations now work roughly 3 extra hours per week—and leisure time has dropped by the same amount. Upwork’s research puts it bluntly: 77% of employees say AI tools have added to their workload.
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 referenced this for AI after DeepSeek rattled the markets. Erik Brynjolfsson argues it applies to AI-augmented occupations—coders, radiologists, translators. Make something more efficient and you find more things to do with it.
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 once protected us from infinite expectations evaporates. This is the Jevons paradox applied not just to markets or coal, but to our own time and cognitive capacity—a kind of psychological rebound effect where internal expectations outrun what’s actually sustainable.
Keynes predicted a 15-hour work week by now. We got the productivity gains. We work longer hours than ever. Only 21% of employees actually use the time AI saves them for personal life. The rest reinvest it right back into work. 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. The fear was displacement. The reality might be inescapability.
Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill time available. The AI corollary: work expands to fill capabilities available. More capability means more possibility—and more obligation. We should know where this points.