THE COWAN PARADOX

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

The Cowan Paradox, named after historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan's finding that vacuum cleaners didn't reduce housework but raised cleanliness standards and reassigned labor to fewer people, maps directly onto AI agents in B2B. A Berkeley Haas eight-month field study confirmed it: workers adopted AI, expanded into adjacent roles, stopped separating work from non-work hours, and ended up busier than before.