I had this conversation like five times over the holidays. Family, friends, everyone's got opinions about AI taking jobs now.
And they all get it wrong the same way.
They think: AI does the task → fewer people needed → jobs disappear.
But that's not how efficiency has ever worked. Not once in history.
When design tools got cheap, we didn't hire fewer designers. We just started designing everything. Pitch decks. Social posts. Landing pages. Internal docs. Stuff nobody would've bothered with before Canva existed.
When video production dropped from tens of thousands to basically free, we didn't make fewer videos. We made 1000x more. Now every company thinks they need video for everything. Because they can.
This pattern is so consistent it has a name: the Jevons Paradox. Back in 1865, an economist noticed that when coal engines got more efficient, people didn't use less coal. They used way more. New use cases popped up everywhere.
It keeps happening. Computing went from something only the biggest corporations could afford to something in everyone's pocket. Software went from enterprise-only to every barbershop running the same tools as Fortune 500 companies.
And now it's coming for everything else.
AI is about to do the same thing to all the messy, human work. The stuff that was never automatable before. Reviewing contracts. Writing code. Research. Customer support. Campaigns.
The math changes when the cost of doing something drops to near zero. It's not about ROI anymore. It's about all the projects that never got started because they weren't worth the investment.
The 10-person company that never built custom software? Now someone ships a prototype in a weekend.
The startup that couldn't afford proper legal review? Now they can.
Jobs won't disappear. We'll just do way more work. Most of the AI tokens in the future will go toward things that nobody's doing today - because today, they're too expensive to even try.