5 ms·

Somebody tell Jeff about Jevon's Paradox, or actually don't bother.

deepaksurti 7y ago
Jevon's Paradox [1] An example from [1]: ``` Jevons observed that England's consumption of coal soared after James Watt introduced the Watt steam engine, which greatly improved the efficiency of the coal-fired steam engine from Thomas Newcomen's earlier design. Watt's innovations made coal a more cost-effective power source, leading to the increased use of the steam engine in a wide range of industries. This in turn increased total coal consumption, even as the amount of coal required for any particular application fell. Jevons argued that improvements in fuel efficiency tend to increase (rather than decrease) fuel use ... ``` [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- wallace_f 7y ago
  Here, I know your meaning is about market adoption of AI, but also on the topic of AI this made me wonder why it intuitively feels to me like Jevon's model would be inadequate, but do I only have this intuition because of my education? I think there's another way: critically test the statement: >Jevons argued that improvements in fuel efficiency tend to increase (rather than decrease) fuel use In other words, I can ask: does aggregate fuel usage depend on fuel efficiency? If I state the question this way and ask myself to answer it, it starts to become obviously an incomplete model to use. This may seem so pedestrian but it is so confusing for me to think about in terms of conceptualizing what structure was needed to recognize a poor prediction model and considering a better one. This seems so different than what AI is today.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    I don't quite follow your comment but that isn't about to stop me guessing what you are asking and providing the intuitive model for the paradox. The bad intuition is if X units of a resource are being used to achieve an outcome then providing the option of getting the same outcome with (X - something) will result in less resource use. However, that is ignoring the economic principles of supply and demand to only focus on current use and demand. Reframing it from the supply side: it used to make sense to supply X units to do so much. Now supplying X units can do even more than so much. So the economics of the situation are unlikely to cause a reduction in supply, because if it made sense to supply X units of resource before, it really makes economic sense to supply it now. In fact, since the resource is now more useful (efficiency rose) it probably makes sense to supply even more of it. If Jevons's Paradox actually appears paradoxical, the root cause is a misunderstanding of supply and demand. If efficiency is modelled by moving the supply/demand curves around on a supply/demand chart it is pretty obvious what is going on; efficiency gains are equivalent to moving the supply curve under that model.
- whack 7y ago
  Jevon's paradox only occurs under very specific circumstances. I would bet on it not happening in the context Jeff Dean is referring to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#Cause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#Cause > The size of the direct rebound effect is dependent on the price elasticity of demand for the good.[11] In a perfectly competitive market where fuel is the sole input used, if the price of fuel remains constant but efficiency is doubled, the effective price of travel would be halved (twice as much travel can be purchased). If in response, the amount of travel purchased more than doubles (i.e. demand is price elastic), then fuel consumption would increase, and the Jevons paradox would occur. If demand is price inelastic, the amount of travel purchased would less than double, and fuel consumption would decrease. However, goods and services generally use more than one type of input (e.g. fuel, labour, machinery), and other factors besides input cost may also affect price. These factors tend to reduce the rebound effect, making the Jevons paradox less likely to occur.
rejschaap 7y ago
Is Jevons paradox really a problem when your carbon footprint is zero? > VentureBeat: One of the things that’s come up a lot lately, you know, in the question of climate change — I was talking with Intel AI general manager Naveen Rao recently and he mentioned this idea [that] compute-per-watt should become a standard benchmark, for example, and some of the organizers here are talking about the notion of people being required to share the carbon footprint of the model that they trained for submissions here. > Dean: Yeah, we’d be thrilled with that because all the stuff we trained in our Google Data Center — the carbon footprint is zero.
- account73466 7y ago
  >> all the stuff we trained in our Google Data Center — the carbon footprint is zero That is a lie unless Jeff Dean lives under different physics laws.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    Yeah, unless this is powered entirely by nuclear or renewables, or unless the emitted carbon is then extracted from the atmosphere, the carbon footprint of all this is most definitely not zero. It's like all those celebs buying carbon "offsets" after flying private to climate summits of all sorts. Dude, your carbon footprint is way, way, above zero, and you paying for "offsets" doesn't reduce it one iota.
    - wnkrshm 7y ago
      Even better that the offset projects aren't necessarily helping. Apparently it isn't even clear whether just planting trees anywhere has a net positive influence on combatting the greenhouse effect [0]. Trees may be required to be planted at suitable locations or else they actually contribute to warming. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z
  - joatmon-snoo 7y ago
    It's a mix of (1) great work around sustainable processes and (2) nuances in defining carbon footprint. (disclaimer: work at G) https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-sustainability.appspot.com/pdf/Google_2018-Environmental-Report.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-sustainability.appspot.c... https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/
paganel 7y ago
He probably does know about it because he seems he’s a well-read guy, but I think is too late for him and for people like him now: the pay they receive is too good for them to leave it all for some “principles” and on top of that I think the’ve also managed to acquire come cognitive dissonance traits that allow them to get out of bed in the morning and go to work without feeling guilty. Otherwise I cannot understand how he can really think that “more AI” is going to help with deforestation, as in “more AI” probably means less overall costs for bad people in the Amazon (where your major costs are people-related, it’s phisically very demanding cutting down trees in an Equatorial climate) which in turn means more trees being cut down. And this is just the beginning of it.
- nl 7y ago
  Jeff is right. Training a machine learning model for any common task is getting radically cheaper and more energy efficient. This is a combination of both better hardware (eg, Google TPUs) and better optimisation of training techniques (which is mostly done outside Google). Eg, DAWN Bench[1] benchmarks training of ReseNet50 to 93% accuracy. This used to take days. Now the FastAI group has shown you can do it in 18 minutes on 16 p3.16xlarge on AWS Spot instances. This is a huge energy saving. Huawei has shown you can do it on 16x8xV100s on their cloud in less than 3 minutes. [1] https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/ https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/
  - paganel 7y ago
    “Energy saving” does not mean “cool, then we won’t use/consume that saved energy anymore”, it means “cool, now there’s more stuff for us to do/build with the same energy as before”. And more stuff to do/build means more pressure on the environment.
  - aguyfromnb 7y ago
    Electronic computers have become vastly more energy efficient since they became widely used in the 60s. On net, do we spend more or less energy on computers now than we did then? That's the paradox. The cheaper energy becomes, the more uses we find for it.
  - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
derangedHorse 7y ago
I think google as a whole understands this concept. Isn't that why they've held off on the release of their self-driving car? I can't remember where I read this from but I remember an interview where someone said they didn't want to release their self-driving car to the world until it was X-times better than the average human driver, and extremely competitive with its price.

Jevon's Paradox [1] An example from [1]: ``` Jevons observed that England's consumption of coal soared after James Watt introduced the Watt steam engine, which greatly improved the efficiency of the coal-fired steam engine from Thomas Newcomen's earlier design. Watt's innovations made coal a more cost-effective power source, leading to the increased use of the steam engine in a wide range of industries. This in turn increased total coal consumption, even as the amount of coal required for any particular application fell. Jevons argued that improvements in fuel efficiency tend to increase (rather than decrease) fuel use ... ``` [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

wallace_f 7y ago
Here, I know your meaning is about market adoption of AI, but also on the topic of AI this made me wonder why it intuitively feels to me like Jevon's model would be inadequate, but do I only have this intuition because of my education? I think there's another way: critically test the statement: >Jevons argued that improvements in fuel efficiency tend to increase (rather than decrease) fuel use In other words, I can ask: does aggregate fuel usage depend on fuel efficiency? If I state the question this way and ask myself to answer it, it starts to become obviously an incomplete model to use. This may seem so pedestrian but it is so confusing for me to think about in terms of conceptualizing what structure was needed to recognize a poor prediction model and considering a better one. This seems so different than what AI is today.
- roenxi 7y ago
  I don't quite follow your comment but that isn't about to stop me guessing what you are asking and providing the intuitive model for the paradox. The bad intuition is if X units of a resource are being used to achieve an outcome then providing the option of getting the same outcome with (X - something) will result in less resource use. However, that is ignoring the economic principles of supply and demand to only focus on current use and demand. Reframing it from the supply side: it used to make sense to supply X units to do so much. Now supplying X units can do even more than so much. So the economics of the situation are unlikely to cause a reduction in supply, because if it made sense to supply X units of resource before, it really makes economic sense to supply it now. In fact, since the resource is now more useful (efficiency rose) it probably makes sense to supply even more of it. If Jevons's Paradox actually appears paradoxical, the root cause is a misunderstanding of supply and demand. If efficiency is modelled by moving the supply/demand curves around on a supply/demand chart it is pretty obvious what is going on; efficiency gains are equivalent to moving the supply curve under that model.
whack 7y ago
Jevon's paradox only occurs under very specific circumstances. I would bet on it not happening in the context Jeff Dean is referring to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#Cause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#Cause > The size of the direct rebound effect is dependent on the price elasticity of demand for the good.[11] In a perfectly competitive market where fuel is the sole input used, if the price of fuel remains constant but efficiency is doubled, the effective price of travel would be halved (twice as much travel can be purchased). If in response, the amount of travel purchased more than doubles (i.e. demand is price elastic), then fuel consumption would increase, and the Jevons paradox would occur. If demand is price inelastic, the amount of travel purchased would less than double, and fuel consumption would decrease. However, goods and services generally use more than one type of input (e.g. fuel, labour, machinery), and other factors besides input cost may also affect price. These factors tend to reduce the rebound effect, making the Jevons paradox less likely to occur.

rejschaap 7y ago

Is Jevons paradox really a problem when your carbon footprint is zero? > VentureBeat: One of the things that’s come up a lot lately, you know, in the question of climate change — I was talking with Intel AI general manager Naveen Rao recently and he mentioned this idea [that] compute-per-watt should become a standard benchmark, for example, and some of the organizers here are talking about the notion of people being required to share the carbon footprint of the model that they trained for submissions here. > Dean: Yeah, we’d be thrilled with that because all the stuff we trained in our Google Data Center — the carbon footprint is zero.

account73466 7y ago
>> all the stuff we trained in our Google Data Center — the carbon footprint is zero That is a lie unless Jeff Dean lives under different physics laws.
- m0zg 7y ago
  Yeah, unless this is powered entirely by nuclear or renewables, or unless the emitted carbon is then extracted from the atmosphere, the carbon footprint of all this is most definitely not zero. It's like all those celebs buying carbon "offsets" after flying private to climate summits of all sorts. Dude, your carbon footprint is way, way, above zero, and you paying for "offsets" doesn't reduce it one iota.
  - wnkrshm 7y ago
    Even better that the offset projects aren't necessarily helping. Apparently it isn't even clear whether just planting trees anywhere has a net positive influence on combatting the greenhouse effect [0]. Trees may be required to be planted at suitable locations or else they actually contribute to warming. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z
- joatmon-snoo 7y ago
  It's a mix of (1) great work around sustainable processes and (2) nuances in defining carbon footprint. (disclaimer: work at G) https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-sustainability.appspot.com/pdf/Google_2018-Environmental-Report.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-sustainability.appspot.c... https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/

paganel 7y ago

He probably does know about it because he seems he’s a well-read guy, but I think is too late for him and for people like him now: the pay they receive is too good for them to leave it all for some “principles” and on top of that I think the’ve also managed to acquire come cognitive dissonance traits that allow them to get out of bed in the morning and go to work without feeling guilty. Otherwise I cannot understand how he can really think that “more AI” is going to help with deforestation, as in “more AI” probably means less overall costs for bad people in the Amazon (where your major costs are people-related, it’s phisically very demanding cutting down trees in an Equatorial climate) which in turn means more trees being cut down. And this is just the beginning of it.

nl 7y ago
Jeff is right. Training a machine learning model for any common task is getting radically cheaper and more energy efficient. This is a combination of both better hardware (eg, Google TPUs) and better optimisation of training techniques (which is mostly done outside Google). Eg, DAWN Bench[1] benchmarks training of ReseNet50 to 93% accuracy. This used to take days. Now the FastAI group has shown you can do it in 18 minutes on 16 p3.16xlarge on AWS Spot instances. This is a huge energy saving. Huawei has shown you can do it on 16x8xV100s on their cloud in less than 3 minutes. [1] https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/ https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/
- paganel 7y ago
  “Energy saving” does not mean “cool, then we won’t use/consume that saved energy anymore”, it means “cool, now there’s more stuff for us to do/build with the same energy as before”. And more stuff to do/build means more pressure on the environment.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  Electronic computers have become vastly more energy efficient since they became widely used in the 60s. On net, do we spend more or less energy on computers now than we did then? That's the paradox. The cheaper energy becomes, the more uses we find for it.
- 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

derangedHorse 7y ago

I think google as a whole understands this concept. Isn't that why they've held off on the release of their self-driving car? I can't remember where I read this from but I remember an interview where someone said they didn't want to release their self-driving car to the world until it was X-times better than the average human driver, and extremely competitive with its price.