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- Hacker News
- > if you automate 99% of a job, that last 1% the human has to do is incredibly valuable because it’s bottlenecking everything else.
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.
by absurd1st - The inflation in health care cost is not down to Jevons in my opinion. The likelihood of AI job displacement is low because the demand backlog is high.
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)
by ggm - > From the article: If you live in the United States today, and you accidentally knock a hole in your wall, it’s probably cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV and stick it in front of the hole, compared to hiring a handyman to fix your drywall.
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?
by ZeroGravitas - One interesting consequence of this is that your opportunity cost is now highest it's ever been. By choosing to post on Hacker News instead of spending my time better (perhaps even as simply as watching my daughter sleep) I am wasting more value than ever before. In days past, you were substituting something mindless for this. Today, by not spending your time with your family, or reading, or on your hobby or relaxing you are paying an ever more valuable slice of time on addictive social media like this.by arjie
- Just had our minisplit develop a leak after 7 years.
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
by magicalhippo - I'm not sure why everyone picks on radiology as the 'obvious' field that will get automated. So far it has been the opposite:
> 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-...
- That's a lot of economic theorizing, but to me, it doesn't seem to be substantiated all that well.
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.
by chemotaxis - The author makes an error while explaining Jevons’ Paradox. They say “the cheaper and faster we got at producing coal, the more coal we ended up using”. But that’s not paradoxical at all. That’s basic supply and demand curve from economics 101. It’s exactly what you’d expect.
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.
by testdelacc1