#jevons-paradox

#jevons-paradox

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize winning computer scientist who is often referred to as the "Godfather of AI", famously asserted in 2016 that, "People should stop training radiologists now. It's just completely obvious that in five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists." The logical expectation would be that the number of radiologists should begin to decline over time as they begin to get replaced by AI.

To explain why, Levie pointed to economist William Stanley Jevons. In 1865, Jevons observed that more efficient steam engines didn't curb coal use in England but drove it higher, as cheaper energy fueled new industries - a dynamic now known as the Jevons paradox. Levie said the same pattern has repeated itself in computing, with each major wave of cheaper technology - from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs - dramatically expanding adoption.