Cheaper cognition expands cognitive demand rather than contracting it

The doomer syllogism: AI can do our thinking → humans lose their moat → terminal value goes to zero. The hidden assumption is that we've already done all the thinking we'll ever need or want. That assumption is absurd on its face.

Jevons Paradox says that when the cost of a powerful input falls, we use more of it, not less. When fossil fuels made energy cheap, we didn't just put whalers out of business — we invented plastics. Cheap energy didn't saturate energy demand; it created entirely new categories of energy demand that hadn't existed before.

The same logic applies to cognition. When AI carries an increasingly large share of the cognitive load, humans aren't freed to pat their tum-tums and hit lunch early. They're freed to tackle more ambitious problems than were previously tractable. Robotics, space, biotech, policy research — the outer limits of "how much thinking the world needs" are nowhere in sight. The doomer case requires freezing demand for cognition at its current level at the exact moment intelligence gets cheap.

Source claim: Cheap cognition will expand demand for cognitive work via Jevons Paradox, just as cheap energy expanded energy demand rather than saturating it.