How cheaper AI drives higher consumption

HostIt feels like every time we get a new tool that's supposed to save us time or money, we just end up busier than before. We keep hearing that AI is getting cheaper and faster, which sounds like it should give us a breather, but instead, it's popping up in everything from our to-do lists to our refrigerators. Why is it that making something cost less always seems to lead to us using way more of it?

GuestIt's a strange loop. You would think that if it takes less power or less money to do a task, we would just do the same amount of work and keep the extra time or money. But history shows we almost never do that. There's an old idea from the eighteen hundreds called the Jevons Paradox. Back then, a man named William Jevons was looking at coal. People had just built these new, better steam engines that didn't need as much coal to run. Everyone thought they would save so much coal. But the opposite happened. Because the engines were so cheap to run, everyone wanted one for their boat, their factory, or their train. They ended up digging up more coal than ever because the technology made coal more useful, not just more efficient.

HostSo by making it cheaper, we actually turned it into a must-have for everyone?

GuestYeah, it made the work more profitable. With AI, we're seeing the same thing. If it costs a lot of money to have a computer write a bit of code or summarize a paper, you only do it when you absolutely have to. But when the cost drops to almost nothing, you start using it for stuff that wasn't even worth doing yesterday. You have it write a poem for your cat or sort your ten thousand vacation photos. We're not just replacing old work; we're inventing new work because the price of a thought has plummeted.

HostBut I only have so much time in the day. Even if it's cheap, I can't spend all day looking at things the AI made for me, so surely there's a limit to how much we can actually use?

GuestYou would think so, but the limit keeps moving. Think about how we use light. Before we had good bulbs, people went to bed when the sun went down because candles were pricey and dim. When light became cheap and easy, we didn't just stay up for one extra hour and save our money. We lit up the streets, we stayed up all night, and we built whole cities that never go dark. We took the savings and spent them on a totally different way of living. With AI, the extra time you save on one task usually just gets sucked up by three new tasks that the AI also made possible. If a report used to take a day and now it takes an hour, your boss doesn't say to go home early. They ask for eight reports instead of one.

HostThat sounds like we're just running faster on a treadmill that we built ourselves. If the goal was to make things easier, it feels like we missed the mark.

GuestWell, it makes things easier for the individual task, but it changes the whole game. Look at something like customer service. It used to be that you only called a company if something was really broken, because sitting on hold was a pain for you and paying people to answer was a pain for them. Now, a company can have a thousand AI bots talking to customers for pennies. That sounds great, but it means they might stop trying to make the product simple to use. They figure that if the customer gets confused, they can just talk to the bot for an hour. It's cheap for the company, so they let the quality of the actual thing slide. We end up in more conversations that don't need to happen, just because the cost of talking dropped to zero.

HostSo you're saying it actually lets us be lazier about how we design the world around us?

GuestIn a way, yeah. It's like what happened with salt. Long ago, salt was so rare it was used as money. You were very careful with it. Now, salt is everywhere and it costs nothing, so we put it in everything, even things that don't need it. We use it to melt ice on the road. We're not careful because we don't have to be. AI is becoming the salt of the digital world. We're tossing it into every app and every piece of software, not because it makes the app better, but just because we can. We're using it for things that are a waste of energy and time, simply because the friction is gone.

HostI guess I struggle with the idea that this is a bad thing, though. If I can build an app or write a book because the AI makes it cheap enough for me to try, is that not a win for everyone?

GuestIt can be. But there's a hidden cost. When everyone can make a book or an app for free, the world gets flooded with stuff. It gets harder to find the good things in a sea of average things. It's like email. Email is free to send, which is great, but that's exactly why your inbox is full of junk. If it cost ten cents to send an email, you would only get the ones that mattered. By making the thinking part of AI so cheap, we're inviting a flood of middle-of-the-road noise that we then need even more AI to help us sort through. It's a cycle that feeds itself.

HostSo we use AI to handle the mess that other AI created?

GuestWe're quickly getting to a point where we use bots to write our emails and other bots to read them, creating a world of chatter where no person was ever actually involved.

HostThose old light bulbs were so pricey we only turned them on for dinner, but now that they cost nothing, we leave every lamp in the house burning until dawn.