It's so counter-intuitive that even seasoned AI researchers get it wrong. It happened to radiologists, it's about to happen to Lawyers too [1].
[1]:https://fortune.com/2026/05/04/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hint...
The difference in capital deployed is huge. A common laptop on my desk vs big bucks for a real estate full of medical imaging equipment. If radiology becomes less profitable the industry won't deploy as many imaging machines. Legal doesn't have that moat.
Radiologists don't do this, that's just rad techs. There's specifically been an explosion in the need for AI review of real radiology analysis and handling complex patient situations.
Lawyers are exactly the counter example and how stupid this meme is.
If I was convicted of a crime and had access to Claude in jail, of course I would use profoundly more "law research". You wouldn't hire more lawyers though, you would do the law research yourself because you would be empowered to do law research in ways you wouldn't have been able to do previously and an order of magnitude cheaper than a human lawyer.
Food/farming is really the best example of the stupidity of this meme though. As if the increase in farming automation leads to more farmers as opposed to an increase in the consumption/quality/diversity/output of food.
The meme is a category error as it relates to the output vs the paid for human activity.
America is the most litigious country known to man, it seems hyper implausible that as the cost of lawyers comes down with increased AI driven productivity, people won’t be reaching for their lawyers in infinitely more situations. Most legal issues involve no jail time.
Whether you believe the paradox will apply widely is purely a function of your algorithmic feed bubbles and the amount of AI panic on them. And that’s it.