A big “What if”

Hey there,

I posted this on my blog this week, but I wanted to share as it’s a hopeful thought in a doom-ridden time.

Right now, we’re all a little 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. That 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 workers).

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.

Thanks for reading. I’ve also been quietly launching new product experiments recently. Here’s a roundup of the best ones:

• RoadReport: Get an instant breakdown of your Gumroad sales insights & growth opportunities. Email me for an early access password.

• Soources: Human-curated content. No algorithm. No noise. Just sources someone actually chose.

• UserrStory – turns your product idea into a comic strip. Works surprisingly well for explaining what something does, from the user’s point of view.

Talk soon,

Mark