Great post from Tina He on the future of work in the era of AI. Firstly, we’ve been coming at things all wrong:

Traditional economics might predict that AI-boosted productivity would reduce working hours, a four-day weekend for tasks that once took five days. But reality has different plans. We’re witnessing what I call the “labor rebound effect”—productivity doesn’t eliminate work; it transforms it, multiplies it, elevates its complexity. The time saved becomes time reinvested, often with compound interest.

Tina predicts that the productivity boost we’ll get from AI will instead reduce to three key outcomes:

Leisure’s opportunity cost skyrockets. When an hour of work generates what once took days, rest becomes luxury taxed by your own conscience. Every pause carries an invisible price tag that flickers in your peripheral vision.

Productivity breeds new demand. Like efficient engines creating new energy uses, AI can create entirely new work categories and expectations.

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

This puts us at risk of falling into our own trap:

We risk falling into what Scott Alexander might call a Malthusian trap, where competitive pressures force everyone to sacrifice everything else at the altar of productivity, creating a collective outcome no individual wants.

However, there is a positive twist to the tale:

When technical execution becomes trivially easy, when anyone can spin up a startup, design a fashion line, or produce a film, the scarce resource becomes knowing what’s worth doing in the first place. And what’s worth doing is typically deeply subjective.

This may be the good news for those that didn’t dare to fully lean into what they love and want to do. What if the most game-optimal play in the new system is actually to become relentlessly, unapologetically you?

Interesting throughout and worth reading.