5 ms·

Jevons Paradox [1] > when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption

by Balooga 1mo ago

Jevons Paradox [1] > when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Las Vegas replaced the expensive incandescent lighting on the strip with cheaper to run LED equivalents. But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays. I think the same will happen with tokens. As the cost of tokens comes down, these models will just consume more tokens.

perching_aix 1mo ago
Sounds like a variation on the induced demand principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand Related: - Parkinson's law: "Work expands to fill the available time." https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parkinson%27s_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parkinson%27s_Law - Lewis–Mogridge position: "Traffic expands to meet the available road space." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_positio... And I pretty much just plain agree, this is exactly what will happen. I don't think there's anything wrong with it (in isolation) either, though I do already find myself pointing out that we're misusing LLMs at work sometimes (most notably, a recent mini project could have been a jinja template - and it did become one thanks to me pushing back on this). Abundance is one thing, waste and misuse is another.
- bena 1mo ago
  Also Jevon's Paradox: the more efficient a system becomes, the more it gets used, making it use more resources rather than less.
AndrewKemendo 1mo ago
Turns out Grey Goo was just thermal paste
- euroderf 1mo ago
  Just wait. An A.I. will devise a formula for a real grey goo.
bee_rider 1mo ago
Definitely not going to argue against the Jevons paradox in general, it is observed in various cases. The lightbulb thing seems different though? Or at least it is a specific subset. Lights in Las Vegas are sort of an advertisement, right? In the sense that having the brightest or most interesting (or whatever) lights draw attention to your show, casino, hotel, whatever. It’s kind of a zero sum game in that the different shops are competing for the finite attention of a more-or-less set number of tourist. I think part of the Jevons paradox is that society generally finds more useful applications of the newly cheap thing. If the thing’s only purpose is to compete better in a competition with a set prize (all of the tourists’ money), that’s constrained in some way. Intelligence is weird though. I guess we could eventually hit the point where, I dunno, maybe there’s some information theoretic bound where we process all of our signals as cleverly as possible and aren’t bound by intelligence anymore. Obviously we’re nowhere near that. It would be a very alien environment.
Frieren 1mo ago
> I think the same will happen with tokens. As the cost of tokens comes down, these models will just consume more tokens. That sounds a race to the bottom for AI companies profits. I do not think that LEDs are high profit margin items.
everdrive 1mo ago
> But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays. People are a gas; they expand the fill the space they're in. If you give someone a big house, they'll fill it with crap. If you make food cheap, they'll eat too much, even when it harms their health. Making things cheaper usually just makes making them more prevalent. It's why computers are not faster than 20 years ago. They're merely more capable -- developers quickly and aggressively fill up (and overflow) all that added capability until you're back in the same place you used to be.
- jayd16 1mo ago
  Anyone not living paycheck to paycheck is just constantly gorging on fast food?
  - everdrive 1mo ago
    I don't mean to be glib, but for the most part, yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/well/child-obesity-un-report.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/well/child-obesity-un-rep... Obesity is nearly everywhere. In the old days, "prosperous" might have been a euphemism for "fat," as only the rich could afford to be fat. Now even people who are "food insecure" are often quite fat. Some of this of course is due to food quality, but ultimately there are no starving fat people.
    - jayd16 1mo ago
      How does "people will uncontrollably eat if given the chance" turn into "there are no starving fat people". You're right that obesity is not necessarily linked to overeating . How is this relevant to your original point? Isn't it a complete contradiction to what you were saying before? The original post was hyperbolic to the point of nonsense and now it seems we're on a completely different topic.
      - everdrive 1mo ago
        >You're right that obesity is not necessarily linked to overeating This can be true, but I think some people are confused. The vast majority of the time, it is linked to overeating. There are some edge cases where there is something else going on metabolically, but most people do over eat.
Flamkuchlo 1mo ago
Tokens for sure because we still waiting for agents talking to agents as a default. Like your agent team and very long or 24/7 running agents. But we never scaled intelligence like this. The industrieal revolution created for the people at that time quite a huge issue / it was disruptive. What will hapen to us though?
conjecTech 1mo ago
Jevon's Paradox says nothing about the size of the incremental demand though. Lighting is a great example. The US went from spending 15% of our electricity on lighting to ~4%. LEDs are maybe 5x as efficient, so that would be 3% without any change in usage. So we did see maybe a 30% increase in consumption as a result of lower prices, but that was nowhere near large enough to offset the efficiency gain in terms of overall consumption. Las Vegas may have, but that is a very small part of overall usage. I anticipate we will see something similar with intelligence. There is probably headroom to consume 100x as much intelligence in R&D. But that isn't most of the economy. Will run of the mill service jobs increase their use of intelligence by enough to offset the effect of cheaper prices? I think that's the real question.
- TheOtherHobbes 1mo ago
  Intelligence is a lever, not a fluid. Power depends on how much force it can apply to specific points, not how much exists in general. True high-intelligence outputs (Maxwell's equations, the Fourier Transform, quantum theory) are fundamentally transformative in ways that mid-high-competence (starting a generic B2B SaaS, making another CRUD app) aren't. Which is why we've assumed we're already pretty far down the path to AI, but we really aren't. Solving random Erdős problems isn't the same as opening up a completely new kind of math/science with game changing practical applications. I don't think you can get to that level with more compute and more tokens. I think it's going to take new higher level knowledge representations and new kinds of training to get there. And the token count and compute may turn out to be lower than what we're using now.
- HDThoreaun 1mo ago
  Is that because non lighting electricity use increased though? 30% increase in the percentage of a growing pie isnt the same as a straight 30% increase
  - conjecTech 1mo ago
    No, per capita electricity usage dropped slightly over the last 25 years, driven in part by LED adoption.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

by Balooga 1mo ago

perching_aix 1mo ago

Sounds like a variation on the induced demand principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand Related: - Parkinson's law: "Work expands to fill the available time." https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parkinson%27s_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parkinson%27s_Law - Lewis–Mogridge position: "Traffic expands to meet the available road space." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_positio... And I pretty much just plain agree, this is exactly what will happen. I don't think there's anything wrong with it (in isolation) either, though I do already find myself pointing out that we're misusing LLMs at work sometimes (most notably, a recent mini project could have been a jinja template - and it did become one thanks to me pushing back on this). Abundance is one thing, waste and misuse is another.

bena 1mo ago
Also Jevon's Paradox: the more efficient a system becomes, the more it gets used, making it use more resources rather than less.

AndrewKemendo 1mo ago

Turns out Grey Goo was just thermal paste

euroderf 1mo ago
Just wait. An A.I. will devise a formula for a real grey goo.

bee_rider 1mo ago

Definitely not going to argue against the Jevons paradox in general, it is observed in various cases. The lightbulb thing seems different though? Or at least it is a specific subset. Lights in Las Vegas are sort of an advertisement, right? In the sense that having the brightest or most interesting (or whatever) lights draw attention to your show, casino, hotel, whatever. It’s kind of a zero sum game in that the different shops are competing for the finite attention of a more-or-less set number of tourist. I think part of the Jevons paradox is that society generally finds more useful applications of the newly cheap thing. If the thing’s only purpose is to compete better in a competition with a set prize (all of the tourists’ money), that’s constrained in some way. Intelligence is weird though. I guess we could eventually hit the point where, I dunno, maybe there’s some information theoretic bound where we process all of our signals as cleverly as possible and aren’t bound by intelligence anymore. Obviously we’re nowhere near that. It would be a very alien environment.

Frieren 1mo ago

> I think the same will happen with tokens. As the cost of tokens comes down, these models will just consume more tokens. That sounds a race to the bottom for AI companies profits. I do not think that LEDs are high profit margin items.

everdrive 1mo ago

> But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays. People are a gas; they expand the fill the space they're in. If you give someone a big house, they'll fill it with crap. If you make food cheap, they'll eat too much, even when it harms their health. Making things cheaper usually just makes making them more prevalent. It's why computers are not faster than 20 years ago. They're merely more capable -- developers quickly and aggressively fill up (and overflow) all that added capability until you're back in the same place you used to be.

jayd16 1mo ago
Anyone not living paycheck to paycheck is just constantly gorging on fast food?
- everdrive 1mo ago
  I don't mean to be glib, but for the most part, yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/well/child-obesity-un-report.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/well/child-obesity-un-rep... Obesity is nearly everywhere. In the old days, "prosperous" might have been a euphemism for "fat," as only the rich could afford to be fat. Now even people who are "food insecure" are often quite fat. Some of this of course is due to food quality, but ultimately there are no starving fat people.
  - jayd16 1mo ago
    How does "people will uncontrollably eat if given the chance" turn into "there are no starving fat people". You're right that obesity is not necessarily linked to overeating . How is this relevant to your original point? Isn't it a complete contradiction to what you were saying before? The original post was hyperbolic to the point of nonsense and now it seems we're on a completely different topic.
    - everdrive 1mo ago
      >You're right that obesity is not necessarily linked to overeating This can be true, but I think some people are confused. The vast majority of the time, it is linked to overeating. There are some edge cases where there is something else going on metabolically, but most people do over eat.

Flamkuchlo 1mo ago

Tokens for sure because we still waiting for agents talking to agents as a default. Like your agent team and very long or 24/7 running agents. But we never scaled intelligence like this. The industrieal revolution created for the people at that time quite a huge issue / it was disruptive. What will hapen to us though?

conjecTech 1mo ago

Jevon's Paradox says nothing about the size of the incremental demand though. Lighting is a great example. The US went from spending 15% of our electricity on lighting to ~4%. LEDs are maybe 5x as efficient, so that would be 3% without any change in usage. So we did see maybe a 30% increase in consumption as a result of lower prices, but that was nowhere near large enough to offset the efficiency gain in terms of overall consumption. Las Vegas may have, but that is a very small part of overall usage. I anticipate we will see something similar with intelligence. There is probably headroom to consume 100x as much intelligence in R&D. But that isn't most of the economy. Will run of the mill service jobs increase their use of intelligence by enough to offset the effect of cheaper prices? I think that's the real question.

TheOtherHobbes 1mo ago
Intelligence is a lever, not a fluid. Power depends on how much force it can apply to specific points, not how much exists in general. True high-intelligence outputs (Maxwell's equations, the Fourier Transform, quantum theory) are fundamentally transformative in ways that mid-high-competence (starting a generic B2B SaaS, making another CRUD app) aren't. Which is why we've assumed we're already pretty far down the path to AI, but we really aren't. Solving random Erdős problems isn't the same as opening up a completely new kind of math/science with game changing practical applications. I don't think you can get to that level with more compute and more tokens. I think it's going to take new higher level knowledge representations and new kinds of training to get there. And the token count and compute may turn out to be lower than what we're using now.
HDThoreaun 1mo ago
Is that because non lighting electricity use increased though? 30% increase in the percentage of a growing pie isnt the same as a straight 30% increase
- conjecTech 1mo ago
  No, per capita electricity usage dropped slightly over the last 25 years, driven in part by LED adoption.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]