Jevons Paradox: a personal perspective ⊗ Terms of centaur service ⊗ Five attitudes towards climate change

Jevons Paradox: a personal perspective

Great piece by Tina He, where she discusses the “psychological Jevons Paradox,” where the tools designed to increase productivity end up intensifying our workload and expectations. As efficiency rises, the opportunity cost of not working becomes immense, leading to a cycle where increased productivity breeds new demands and complex competition. He highlights the importance of redefining success and intentionally imposing constraints to preserve our humanity, rather than succumbing to the relentless pursuit of optimisation.

A lot of people are wondering if/when they’ll be out of a job, some us are exploring augmentation, becoming “centaurs,” as in the next piece. As He shows, there’s also a need, or a opportunity for exploration, of limits to keep these possibilities in check. It’s also the second time this week that a life of leisure, with much more limited hours of work, comes to mind. We’ll likely have to each build it for ourselves if we want it, there won’t be an edict to use the AI opportunity for a rebalancing of work hours.

The author also had me wondering if, instead of newly efficient tasks taking up as much time as before, just MOAR of them, that time should not be filled with other explorations. If, as many are predicting (hoping), transdisciplinary, liberal art oriented, generalist backgrounds and mindsets are the best profiles to deal with the coming of AI, then is your newly gained efficiency better used for more work; more leisure; or more learning and diversifying your knowledge and understanding?

“When an hour of work generates what once took days, rest becomes luxury taxed by your own conscience.” That might be the case for a little while, as long as the perceived value keeps up, but pretty quickly, the value will go down and you’ll just have to work that many more tasks to find the same revenu. No more luxury of rest, just way more deliverables.

What happens when the consensual vision around how AI minimizes work time and maximizes leisure time is in fact, wrong. And what happens in reality, when those that are already productive, only work so much more? And as individuals become much more empowered, how does one stop oneself from working, that now the opportunity cost of not working becomes almost infinite? […]

The game theory is unforgiving: when everyone can produce 10x more, the baseline resets, leaving us all running faster just to stay in place. […]

Each evolution in how we measure progress has pushed us further from human-scaled metrics toward increasingly artificial optimizations. We've moved from “enough food to survive the winter” (a natural limit) to “maximum possible output” (a limitless treadmill). […]

In the Midjourney’s Discord, we see glimpses of this future: artists, developers, and enthusiasts fluidly moving between roles, their enhanced capabilities allowing them to operate as both creators and curators, teachers and students, often simultaneously.

Terms of centaur service

Venkatesh Rao describes embracing AI-assisted writing as a creatively rejuvenating process that has increased his output threefold while making writing enjoyable again. He notes that AI collaboration often produces ideas he hadn’t consciously considered, allowing him to learn from and genuinely enjoy reading his own work—something previously rare with his unassisted writing. He also critiques “AI dualism” (the distinction between AI-assisted and unassisted content) as an artificial boundary destined to disappear, similar to how “digital dualism” (the online/offline divide) eventually faded. Rao positions himself as an “AI+human centaur” who uses AI for initial drafts and brainstorming while still writing some content unassisted, emphasizing that this hybrid approach requires similar high-level thinking but accelerates production significantly. He rejects both utopian and dystopian AI narratives, instead focusing on practical expectations for writer-reader relationships in this new paradigm.

It’s funny, he mentions that “people often complain I am being too cryptic or gnomic,” which I’ve done myself. He suggests using AI for explanations while reading, just as he uses it for writing.

Definitely a useful piece if you are considering AI in your writing, and as a relevant signpost in our transition from AI to “it’s just software,” which is bound to happen. What’s the real difference between autocompleting a word, which virtually everyone does, and completing a full phrase or paragraph? As he explains quite well, you might lose something in not writing completely by yourself, but you gain in other ways. So it’s not lesser writing, it’s different writing. In some ways, assuming your work on it and don’t just delegate a task, it’s like going from learning as you write, to learning through discussion. You’ve surely had insights both when writing out your ideas and when talking about them with someone else. The someone here is not “someone,” but it’s somewhat a half-way process, between internal thinking and bouncing off ideas.

Back to “it’s just software,” it also reminds me of e-bikes vs classic bikes. Stats show that people go farther with e-bikes and stretch their range of action quite a bit. By and large, they don’t use e-bikes to be lazy, they ride and commute differently. Same thing here.

Usually I do have to do some iterative work with the LLM to get it there, and that’s the part that’s creative fun. In general, an AI-assisted essay requires about the same amount of high-level thinking effort for me as an unassisted essay, but gets done about 3x-5x faster, since the writing part can be mostly automated. […]

Even when writers write the actual words themselves, the backend of thinking, brainstorming, and research is already being transformed. I suspect the idea of non-AI-assisted writing is already an illusion with many of the writers you’re reading. […]

Yes, it’s a radical technology that will have radical impacts. No, the world won’t end. No, building eschatological scenarios around “AGI” and “Superintelligence” type constructs is not a meaningful way to understand that impact.

Five attitudes towards climate change

danah boyd describes how climate change responses have evolved beyond the traditional science-believer versus denier dichotomy into distinct worldviews that shape policy approaches. She identifies five worldviews: global (seeking coordinated international solutions), hedonist (prioritizing profit and lifestyle over climate action), evangelical (viewing climate disasters as biblical prophecy), xenophobic (focusing on border closure to protect resources from climate refugees), and accelerationist (embracing capitalism’s collapse while seeking planetary escape for selected humans). boyd notes that while the first Felon administration was dominated by hedonists and evangelicals, the second administration appears influenced by xenophobes and accelerationists, creating policy tensions around borders, immigration, and resource allocation—all while ordinary people suffer the consequences of these competing ideologies.

These advocates believed that the US was capable of being self-sustaining when the climate catastrophes started coming. They argued that everything needed to be domestic-centered. The US could not be dependent on other countries when hell broke loose - and it could not let people through its borders. […]

This worldview accepts that most people will die. After all, most people will die due to climate change anyhow. The key is to make sure that the people who are dying do not get in the way of those who are focused on getting us off the planet. The pursuit of protecting humanity is the most moral thing that any of these actors can do. And yes, you guessed it, Elon Musk appears to be the inheritor of this collection of batshit theories.

§ America is going through its every-80-year reinvention. I think there are probably some shortcuts in there, but still a good read for some historical perspective on societal cycles in the US. “Compare our pivot year of 2025 to the previous pivot year of 1945 and the end of World-War II, and then to the end of the American Civil War in 1865, exactly 80 years prior. It will then go back another 80 years to 1785, just after the Revolutionary War as the founders were gearing up for the Constitutional Convention.”

§ Beyond the Torment Nexus: how does science fiction help us prepare for the future? “It may be that we get the best preparation, not from stories of specific technologies or social structures, but from rich exploration of how things can change.” There’s also a pretty good Torment Nexus page on Know Your Meme.

§ Anthropic scientists expose how AI actually ‘thinks’ — and discover it secretly plans ahead and sometimes lies. “The model contains ‘default’ circuits that cause it to decline to answer questions,” the researchers explain. “When a model is asked a question about something it knows, it activates a pool of features which inhibit this default circuit, thereby allowing the model to respond to the question.”

§ Badge AI. “This tool will help you determine to what extent your creative process uses artificial intelligence. Inspired by the Creative Commons model, our badge offers transparency on the genesis of your work.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• By the way, a number of reports from week to week come from Bugge Holm Hansen’s LinkedIn page. He’s an absolute beast at sharing reports day in and day out. Thanks Bugge!
• What if... we experienced the future?. “The seventh edition of the AXA Foresight Report is built on ten what if scenarios developed by leading experts. The authors, comprising researchers, journalists, hackers, designers, entrepreneurs, and futurists, have envisioned potential future breakups, both positive and negative, occurring between 2035 and 2065.”
• Five must-read short story collections for fans of Black Mirror. “If you’re left wanting more after finishing the six most recent episodes—which arrive on April 10th—why not seek out books with similar vibes to fill that void?”
• No Prior Art: Illustrations of Invention. “The Utopia Machine is an ongoing project for which I am painting people’s responses to the question ‘what would make this world into a utopia?’” (Via Art in Dark Times.)

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• How the US public and AI experts view Artificial Intelligence. “A new Pew Research Center report examines the views of two key groups: the American public and experts in the field of AI.”
• Introducing Gemini with personalization. Hard nope for me. “… will be able to use your Google apps, starting with your Search history, to deliver contextually relevant responses that are adapted to your individual interests.”
• AI and the Future of News 2025: what we learnt about how its impact on coverage, newsrooms and society. “Our conference looked at how technology is reshaping the news ecosystem. Here’s a summary of the panels and a few figures from our research”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Meet the solar engineer transforming Lebanon’s power grid. “The rapidly falling cost of solar panels has given Lebanese businesses and families a compelling alternative, and the country has seen a boom in private solar-power installations. Total installed solar capacity jumped nearly eightfold between 2020 and 2022 to more than 870 megawatts, primarily as a result of off-grid rooftop installations.”
• The rise of ‘Frankenstein’ laptops in New Delhi’s repair markets. “It is a daily ritual — resurrecting machines by stitching together motherboards, screens, and batteries scavenged from other trashed older laptops and e-waste — to create functional, low-cost devices.”
• Big tech’s new datacentres will take water from the world’s driest areas. “Amazon, Microsoft and Google are operating datacentres that use vast amounts of water in some of the world’s driest areas and are building many more, the non-profit investigatory organisation SourceMaterial and the Guardian have found.”

Asides

• Hundreds of fantastic creatures inhabit a sprawling universe by Vorja Sánchez. WOW! “Inspired by the diversity of the forest and the vivid drawings of German biologist Ernst Haeckel, Sánchez imagines a vast ecosystem. He’s particularly drawn to patterns and employs similar motifs to create cohesion across multiple pieces. Soft, fluffy fur, slender leaves with curled tips, and gleaming eyes attached to unexpected body parts appear in several of his works.”
• Modern magic unlocks Merlin’s medieval secrets. “A fragile 13th century manuscript fragment, hidden in plain sight as the binding of a 16th-century archival register, has been discovered in Cambridge and revealed to contain rare medieval stories of Merlin and King Arthur.” (Via Kottke.)
• Understanding the Eyes of the Animal Kingdom. “We’ve all seen the thin vertical slits of a snake’s eye. And the weird, rectangular pupils of a goat or sheep. But why do animal eyes differ so wildly?”