Right now, everyone’s uncomfortable.

Will AI take our jobs? Are we all about to be obsolete? Should we be panicking?

The doom feels real. The anxiety is everywhere.

But there’s an economic principle worth considering: the Jevons paradox.

In the 1800s, steam engines got more efficient. Everyone assumed we’d burn LESS coal. Coal demand would collapse.

Turns out, we burned more.

Why? Because efficiency made coal-powered work so cheap and useful that we found a thousand new things to do with it.

More efficiency didn’t reduce demand. It exploded it.

Let’s swap coal for humans (or employees).

AI makes human work radically more productive.

A developer becomes 10x faster. Does the company fire 9 developers? Or does it suddenly have bandwidth to build 10 products instead of 1?

A designer becomes ridiculously efficient. Does the team shrink? Or does the company finally tackle all those projects they never had capacity for?

When something becomes cheap and powerful, we don’t use less of it. We find more things to do with it. It’s one reason we’re all busier than ever since the internet existed, not less.

That’s the paradox.

AI many not just make existing jobs faster.

It may unlock entirely new categories of work that weren’t economically viable before.

Work that required too much human time to be worth it. Problems that were too expensive to solve. Ideas that never made it past “we don’t have the resources.”

Suddenly, they’re possible. And somebody needs to do them.

There’s a “but” coming…

But… nobody actually knows how this plays out.

It could go the other way. Automation could genuinely hollow out entire job categories and leave people behind.

History, however, suggests something different happens when tools get radically better.

We don’t do less. We do more.

Different work. New work. Work we couldn’t have imagined before the tool existed.

The Jevons paradox says efficiency creates demand, not destroys it.

Worth thinking about while everyone’s panicking.