The Meatware Exception: Why Jevons Fails the Working Class
It is a delicious irony of our age. When coal gets efficient, we use more coal. When data gets efficient, we use more data. But when human labor gets efficient, we use fewer humans. Why does the Jevons Paradox suddenly stop working when the "resource" being optimized is a person in a cubicle?
The answer lies in the cold, hard logic of ownership and substitution. You see, Jevons Paradox triggers because the costof the resource drops, stimulating massive new demand. If electricity gets cheaper, I want more of it because it improves my life. But if a worker gets "more efficient"—thanks to AI or automation—they aren't becoming a cheaper, more desirable resource for the market to consume more of. They are becoming redundant. Unlike coal, a human being is a "multi-purpose resource" that comes with annoying overheads: health insurance, lunch breaks, and the inconvenient tendency to ask for a raise.
In the eyes of a corporation, a human is not a resource to be "saved" and reallocated; they are a cost center to be eliminated. When technology improves, we don't use the "saved" human time to let people write poetry or work more deeply. We simply replace the human component with a digital one. In the capitalist business model, the "efficiency dividend" of human labor doesn't go back into hiring more humans—it goes straight into the pockets of the shareholders. We’ve managed to create a world where everything gets consumed more voraciously as it gets cheaper, except for the one thing that actually needs a paycheck to survive.
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