alt Hacker NewsJevon's paradox is a 19th century economic observation about coal that has turned into a meme that people are using to support the most profound bullshit that they already believe to be true a priori.
Lawyers are exactly the counter example and how stupid this meme is.
If I was convicted of a crime and had access to Claude in jail, of course I would use profoundly more "law research". You wouldn't hire more lawyers though, you would do the law research yourself because you would be empowered to do law research in ways you wouldn't have been able to do previously and an order of magnitude cheaper than a human lawyer.
Food/farming is really the best example of the stupidity of this meme though. As if the increase in farming automation leads to more farmers as opposed to an increase in the consumption/quality/diversity/output of food.
The meme is a category error as it relates to the output vs the paid for human activity.
Literally an example of Jevons paradox in the original comment with data happening within the last 3 years.
America is the most litigious country known to man, it seems hyper implausible that as the cost of lawyers comes down with increased AI driven productivity, people won’t be reaching for their lawyers in infinitely more situations. Most legal issues involve no jail time.
Whether you believe the paradox will apply widely is purely a function of your algorithmic feed bubbles and the amount of AI panic on them. And that’s it.