In 1865 an economist named William Stanley Jevons noticed something strange. England had just built far more efficient steam engines, ones that burned less coal to do the same work. Everyone assumed the country would now burn less coal.

England burned way more.

Cheaper coal-per-engine made steam power worth using for a thousand things it was never worth using for before. The efficiency didn't shrink demand. It set it on fire.

That's been called Jevons paradox ever since. Make something much cheaper to use, and people don't use the same amount and pocket the savings. They use far more of it.

I'm bringing this up because Andrej Karpathy mentioned this exact paradox yesterday, about the AI model Anthropic just shipped. He joined Anthropic recently, and in his post he wrote a line I didn't expect from someone announcing a product. He said his own demand for software is growing. He's making more software now, not less, coz each piece costs him almost nothing.