Jevons Paradox of Cognition

Tegmark applies William Stanley Jevons's 1865 paradox—that coal efficiency improvements increased rather than decreased coal consumption—directly to AI. The conventional response to declining factor costs is increased demand: cheap electricity did not produce less electricity but electrification of everything; cheap computation did not produce less computing but computation embedded in every device. Cognition follows the same pattern. AI did not reduce work; it intensified work, as the 2025 Berkeley research documented empirically. Workers who adopted AI tools worked faster, took on more tasks, expanded into domains that had previously belonged to other specialists. Freed time was not reclaimed for rest; it was consumed by additional cognitive activity made possible by the reduction in per-unit cost. Cheaper cognition creates cognitive demand that was previously uneconomical to satisfy.