Should the paradox not be that we PAY more for it? Or, if some process is made more effective, i.e. takes shorter time, we spend more time in that process.
Should the paradox not be that we PAY more for it? Or, if some process is made more effective, i.e. takes shorter time, we spend more time in that process.
Jevons paradox starts with some resource being used more efficiently.
A classic example could be coal. The first steam engines used a ton of coal, but over time more efficient steam engines where created that used way less coal.
One might think that this caused the global coal usage to go down. But the opposite happened, as the overall cost of doing something with a steam engine went down.
Note, that the price of coal itself can remain fixed in this example. So Jevons principle is not (directly) about a resource changing in value.
If LLMs make codes cheaper to produce, then obviously more code will be produced. That's not an instance of Jevons paradox even though the article claims so.
You could say that LLMs means that we can create software with less of the resource that is human software engineers. So one might think that we'll need less software engineers in the future. If, on the other hand, we end up needing more software engineers, then that'll be an instance of Jevons paradox. But the article is not making that claim.
The Jevons paradox is just two curves overlaid - demand and supply. As supply goes up and the price goes down, “new” demand appears that couldn’t be satisfied (economically) at the higher price.
Once the majority of the latent demand has been realized it will stabilize and start to go down.
In the current case of LLMs we’re seeing a Cambrian explosion of code that was quite doable before (demand was there) but there wasn’t the economics to dedicate a coder to it - now anyone with Claude can hack together something that works for them alone.
The paradox is usually presented as:
The People: Hey local government! The roads are so packed with cars they are useless. Fix it!
The Government: We hear you and just finished a huge road expansion project. The roads now have 2x the capacity! Enjoy the new fast roads!
The People: The roads are just as slow as before because they are packed with 2X as many cars now!
So, the paradox is that greatly increasing the capacity of the roads led to the roads being just as slow as before. Maybe even slower. This is because there previously were lots of potential uses of the roads that people did not enact because it would not have been worth the hassle. But, now with 2X the capacity, those uses become viable. So, more people find more uses of the roads up until it gets right back to the limit of everyone patience.
Apply this to coding and you can predict: Coding is much faster and easier now. So, why are all my coders still so busy?
The road thing is usually tied to “induced demand” (which is a bad way of looking at it imo). Jevrons is more directly related to the cost of something dropping increasing the usage because new things that weren’t worthwhile are now doable - related, but more directly tied to things like “smartphones are cheaper now so more people have them”.
You do hit limits eventually (most people get to one smartphone and stop except for replacements) but the surprising paradox is when you don’t even see the possible demand (think: worldwide market for maybe six computers type things) - you have to think of something and then think of what would happen if it was (effectively) cheap as free.
Water in the USA might be an example, it went from something difficult and valuable and precious to we flush our toilets with drinking water - unthinkable wealth to parts of the world even today.
If a smartphone was fifty cents what new uses could be found? If the small shell script that replaces you is now $19 for anyone to develop, what happens?
Yes. Jevon's paradox is that if we need less X to do a single Y, we end up using more X doing Y.
Anyway, it's an specific observation about a single X, Y pair. It some times happens with other things, but anybody claiming it's a universal rule don't know what they are talking about.
It’s cheaper to get married now, so I’ve gotten married fifty times!
Unit cost is down but aggregate cost is up.
Which aggregate?
The aggregate for one person or for the world as a whole?
Yes, I believe you are correct (but imprecise which is why the other commenter disagreed with you).
We pay less per unit, but we pay more in total.
No, we pay less for it. But there's much higher demand so overall use goes up.
Right. That is not a paradox as stated.
The paradox would be:
It is a paradox. The paradox is that increasing the efficiency of resource usage can lead to more resource usage.
If you think that isn't a paradox because you can fairly easily explain why that is the case, you need to go and check what "paradox" means.
You said:
> No, we pay less for it. But there's much higher demand so overall use goes up.
This is economics 101, not a paradox.
To clarify how I read you: "If the price goes down, more people will want to buy, hence more units are sold"
The paradox is that _one_ person, or entity, pays more as the price goes down.