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Yesterday's food service workers are today's web marketers. This might explain why the www has become so polluted with garbage

> In 2025, American diagnostic radiology residency programs offered a record 1,208 positions across all radiology specialties, a four percent increase from 2024, and the field’s vacancy rates are at all-time highs. In 2025, radiology was the second-highest-paid medical specialty in the country, with an average income of $520,000, over 48 percent higher than the average salary in 2015.

Simply put, radiologists do a lot more than merely read scans:

> Radiologists are useful for more than reading scans; a study that followed staff radiologists in three different hospitals in 2012 found that only 36 percent of their time was dedicated to direct image interpretation.

Source: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-algorithm-will-see-you-...

Whereas if you take the extraordinarily difficult step of opening Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox), you understand the real paradox. Jevons observed that when steam engines get more efficient and individually use less coal, we end up deploying many more steam engines in many new industries and use cases, increasing coal consumption overall.

This seems like a basic oversight, maybe this guy hasn’t heard of Wikipedia. On the other hand, I think he wants to push the narrative that AI is seeing enormous productivity gains. He does this by using price per token, which has fallen. Very similar to Jevons supposedly observing “coal production”. But the author is struggling to point to new industries and use cases that were opened up by AI, like when we deployed steam engines back in the 1860s. So he misstates Jevons paradox, removes the paradoxical part, and makes it seem like his thesis makes sense.

Jevons’ Paradox could still apply here! I’m not saying it doesn’t. But we just haven’t seen the examples quite yet. A good example would be an observed surge in demand custom built software as software engineers become more efficient. But lower token costs ain’t it.

You can just as well argue that labor is getting more expensive in the West because of two non-market pressures. First, we have a multitude of government programs that seek to eliminate extreme poverty, so there are fewer people who are desperate to take any job for any money. Second, you have consumer protection policies that make it genuinely expensive to, say, be a HVAC repairman. Educational requirements, permits, licensing, business insurance, waste disposal, etc.

On my neighborhood Facebook group, every time someone asks for recommendations for menial, minimally-skilled backyard labor, they always insist the person needs to be licensed, bonded, and insured. And then, they're surprised that it costs $10,000 to paint a fence.

Everyone complains that it is $7 for a cup of coffee, and yet demand for barrista coffee keeps increasing and demand for barristas keeps increasing.

The shop recommended replacing it, as just the refrigerant is half the price of a new one if most has to be replaced, due to environmental taxes.

Basically a repair is guaranteed to be at least 50% of new price of NOK 23k ($2.3k) installed and can quickly approach 80+% if the guy has to spend time on it.

That made me wonder how on earth they make money on selling these things. And how effective that tax was, given it's pushing us to replace a unit that's probably fine for many more years with just a bit of TLC.

edit: fixed pricing brain fart

I can build a house 4x faster today than my father could back in the day, or alternatively with 4x less labor, and yet he could buy a house, 2 cars, and support 3 kids on his single wage. Meanwhile I struggle to do more than just survive in my little shack house built from scrap on an empty plot doing the same thing.

The only jobs that earn me a decent wage is for corporations or for people near or in the top 1% of wage earners.

If the average person made more money I would have more work and more money. But as it is a lot of residential work would be of negative value to me at the prices people can afford, and with less work to do and farther and farther travel distances for it my prices must keep rising to stay solvent.

This is mostly down to people being afraid of anything even remotely trades-like. Learn to do some basic home repair, it will save you thousands.

> This graph can mean different things to different people: it can mean “what’s regulated versus what isn’t” to some, “where technology makes a difference”

Cars are pretty heavily regulated...

What I see is what is necessary to live and what isn't. Elastic vs inelastic demand.

> the average American middle-class household can comfortably manage a new car lease every two years

Huh, no, the average American middle-class household cannot do this.

> If one sector becomes hugely productive, and creates tons of well-paying jobs, then every other sector’s wages eventually have to rise, in order for their jobs to remain attractive for anyone.

I'm sorry, but anyone who has lived in the lower income brackets knows this just isn't true.

This is hard to read. Whoever wrote this is extremely out of touch and thinks they're eminently intelligent. It reminds me of the "smug San Francisco" South Park episode. The world is going down a road of hurt and you've got elites who are so busy "winning" over the past 50 years running around sniffing their own farts.

And I'm not sure the AI/LLM focus sheds any light at all on the situation. Unfortunately, AI/LLMs aren't AGI and they're just a tool. They're just a better machine (assuming it all pans out) that radiologists all need to become experts in using. The way to analyze the situation isn't that the radiologists are the "bottleneck", the radiologists are the experts who are trained to use the tools.

Until AI becomes physically embodied, that would mean all high-mix, low-volume physical labor is likely going to become a lot more valuable in the mid-term.

Is this not just inflation? If everyone got paid more and everything got more expensive, are we not essentially level?

Sure, that's an assertion.

But (with just as many citations), mine would be:

This boom is absolutely, 100%, fueled by the combined factors of: 1) employees outsourcing the cognitive load of their jobs to models that are, impressively "close", but not quite _as_ good as a well-trained human.

ie, we're replacing google with a fun, but terribly energy-wasteful (and _very often_ factually wrong) "make up an answer" tech.

and 2), AI "app developers" who are having fun with the previously "impossible" (*cf. https://xkcd.com/1425/) APIs of multi-modal natural language, and "didn't sci-fi warn us about this?" simulations.

Neither of which are good for productivity, if we measure productivity as "improving circumstances for the mutual commonwealth of all life". Which is the goal.

* oh, I _did_ use a citation after all.

It is an interesting article, but _far_ too sure of itself in all the wrong areas.

It depends how you measure. The cost in goods or purchasing power goes up, but the cost in hours stays the same.

A ten-fold productivity gain in legal services sounds simply awful for society. Imagine the time and money sink if everyone can sue you for every frivolous thing because AI can prepare and file the paperwork instantly without needing a lawyer. You'll need your own AI to defend against the onslaught of legal disputes.

Every contract for jobs and every terms & conditions for services will be 10x longer because AI has a much higher complexity threshold compared to a human. My belief is that one reason tax returns became much more complicated in the last ~30 years is because of tax preparation software. In the era of paper tax returns, there was a limit to the complexity that an individual or even an accountant could handle, so there was a limit on how complicated the government could make it.

Most normal people rarely need a lawyer in their lives. With AI's productivity explosion in the legal services, you're going to need legal services every day. Your neighbor wants to borrow your chainsaw? Your AI legal agent will negotiate a liability waiver with his AI agent.

While this is true, the costs are inflated because you need to repaint the entire room to get the original look, rather than only pay the cost of merely replacing the drywall. Of course, some handymen are much more expensive than others, so it is possible that is more expensive too.

If you are one of the few using wallpaper and have extra wallpaper for just such emergencies, using the extra wallpaper to paper over it should be cheap.

I can't tell if that's the worst AI boosting analogy I ever heard or the most unwittingly accurate.

First of all, flat screen TV and plasterboard hole repair are in no way substitutable goods.

"Why is there a new TV behind the front door dear? The handle was bashing the drywall and it was cheaper than a handyman."

But okay, let's assume you accidentally but conveniently punched a hole right where you would want a TV. And you don't already have a TV there.

Who is going to wall mount this new TV in a home that can't do basic drywall repair?

Robotics will reduce back injury rates and so reduce Nurse shortages, for example. Misdiagnosis rates cause increases in compensation claims so improvement in diagnostics reduce risk so insurance premiums(for hospitals) should go down or at least not rise as quickly compared to inflation.

Note that the cost of health is high even in the economies without the broken US health system, and we have the baby boom moving through which is a huge bubble of cost associated with age.

Not that there's no component of Jevons in this, but it doesn't explain everything.

A thing said to me in Argentina resonated: They pay doctors, nurses, pharmacists slightly more if they will do out-calls to elderly people in the community at large. The increase in staff cost to have home calls offsets the massive increase in care costs if these people cannot be cared for in their home and move into a managed care facility. It's partly an externality if you privatise healthcare: who cares if the state has to pick up the tab, right? But in a more integrated view of the costs here, its better to pay more for people to help keep the elderly in their own home as long as possible.

(elderly, intending to stay in my own home, not in the US health system)

The author is being (intentionally) naive here.

History and current research suggest that when technology automates the vast majority of a complex job, it can lead to the "deskilling" of the human worker.

This Lancet article (published Oct 2025) discovered that doctors were found to be less adept at finding precancerous growths during colonoscopies after just three months of using an AI tool designed to spot them: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1...

And the thing is, I think the above finding is pretty intuitive.

If AI performs 99% of a radiologist's diagnostic work, the human's role will very likely be reduced to a skill that is more routine, that requires less expertise, like a final check or something - and thus commands lower wages.

I got a $5000 quote to fix my AC 2 summers ago and no amount of Youtube was able to help me DIY a fix.

Maybe in the long term there will be more HVAC techs than auto mechanics. Somehow I don't think that's likely.

I've seen a lot of people blow a lot of money on really basic stuff like this (myself included). The lack of basic awareness around hvac, landscaping, drainage, drywall, plumbing, electrical, et. al. has me wondering if I'm still in the right business. ChatGPT can't carry a bag of sand up a hill or dig a ditch. It can tell you about these things and make you feel like a hypothetical god over them, but it can never do the actual work on site. I don't feel like there's a lot of competition around being in Texas crawl spaces during the summer.

Cost of goods goes down - think factory automation improving line rate.

There is less human intervention, but that intervention requires more expertise.

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/10/24/private-equity-...

I find the term “cost disease” very negative. It actually describes positive social progress.

Instead of a “disease,” it’s really a sign of a healthy, advanced economy.

But, nonetheless, those jobs will probably disappear, and the machine will reorganize itself to maximize its self-legibility, making tons more money but becoming yet more shitty and inhumane in the process. Discarding the whole reason the jobs exist in the first place (stuff like Value and Service — oh excuse me, sorry, meaningless cost centers to be optimized).

Sort of like how Radiologists do all kinds of important shit, that gets entirely hand waved away in this think-piece as 99% automatable. Yeah, sure guys, the radiologist — actual doctors for fucks sake — I’m sure he is nothing but a warm body between the patient and the computer, signing paperwork and collecting cheques.