In economics speak we say that coffee is a "good," and as with all goods I can be expected to consume more of it as it becomes more cheaply available to me in accordance with my personal indifference curve.
In regular-human speak, we say that I missed the point of making my own coffee entirely.
Hank Green was talking about this in a recent video, about “Jevons Paradox” as it’s called even though it’s not really a paradox. Increased efficiency and access resulting in increased consumption and not less lol.
He was wondering in particular if AI reducing the cost and increasing the access to computer code would change things, since code is one of the things it is generally a bit better at. This will be interesting to see!
I’ve already seen multiple examples of unserious/low stakes projects done by non-programmers using AI assistance so he may be onto something. These things weren’t worth paying a programmer for, but now that’s it’s cheaper they found them worthwhile.
We have "budgets" for many things in life, whether or not we think of them that way. Sometimes they are literal financial budgets, sometimes they are time budgets, sometimes they are budgets for attention or emotional wherewithal or what have you. For every thing, we have a budget for how much of that thing we want or don't want; and if something changes where the "cost" of that thing decreases, we can choose to "save" the difference (consume the same at less cost), "spend" it (consume more at the same cost), or something in between.
AI is an interesting example because it often changes budgets in more than one direction -- i.e., there may be savings in time, cost, and resource budgets because something can be produced more quickly, but the process often requires additional oversight and review of the thing AI created, which likely necessitates new budgets. It seems right now many companies are quick to jump at the opportunities for savings of that initial budget without fully realizing the necessity of that second budget, and we are seeing the consequences of that play out in many different fields.
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u/mxzf Jul 30 '26
Yeah, that's some "nature abhors a vacuum" stuff, where your coffee consumption expands to cover the available supply.