People are a gas; they expand the fill the space they're in. If you give someone a big house, they'll fill it with crap. If you make food cheap, they'll eat too much, even when it harms their health.
Making things cheaper usually just makes making them more prevalent. It's why computers are not faster than 20 years ago. They're merely more capable -- developers quickly and aggressively fill up (and overflow) all that added capability until you're back in the same place you used to be.
(...or over 40 years ago)
Obesity is nearly everywhere. In the old days, "prosperous" might have been a euphemism for "fat," as only the rich could afford to be fat. Now even people who are "food insecure" are often quite fat. Some of this of course is due to food quality, but ultimately there are no starving fat people.
I anticipate we will see something similar with intelligence. There is probably headroom to consume 100x as much intelligence in R&D. But that isn't most of the economy. Will run of the mill service jobs increase their use of intelligence by enough to offset the effect of cheaper prices? I think that's the real question.
The lightbulb thing seems different though? Or at least it is a specific subset. Lights in Las Vegas are sort of an advertisement, right? In the sense that having the brightest or most interesting (or whatever) lights draw attention to your show, casino, hotel, whatever. It’s kind of a zero sum game in that the different shops are competing for the finite attention of a more-or-less set number of tourist. I think part of the Jevons paradox is that society generally finds more useful applications of the newly cheap thing. If the thing’s only purpose is to compete better in a competition with a set prize (all of the tourists’ money), that’s constrained in some way.
Intelligence is weird though. I guess we could eventually hit the point where, I dunno, maybe there’s some information theoretic bound where we process all of our signals as cleverly as possible and aren’t bound by intelligence anymore. Obviously we’re nowhere near that. It would be a very alien environment.
its pretty much 101 in any economics class: reducing the price of a unit will increase volume unless youve completely saturated the marked
That sounds a race to the bottom for AI companies profits.
I do not think that LEDs are high profit margin items.
But we never scaled intelligence like this. The industrieal revolution created for the people at that time quite a huge issue / it was disruptive.
What will hapen to us though?
Related:
- Parkinson's law: "Work expands to fill the available time." https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parkinson%27s_Law
- Lewis–Mogridge position: "Traffic expands to meet the available road space." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_positio...
And I pretty much just plain agree, this is exactly what will happen.
I don't think there's anything wrong with it (in isolation) either, though I do already find myself pointing out that we're misusing LLMs at work sometimes (most notably, a recent mini project could have been a jinja template - and it did become one thanks to me pushing back on this). Abundance is one thing, waste and misuse is another.