Comment by CraigJPerry
1 day ago
Electricity prices are static since at least the 70s https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/electricity-...
Total electric production is stagnant over the same period https://www.iea.org/countries/united-states/electricity
If you want to grow value in an economy, how do you do it without growing energy supply and reducing energy cost? Intensive growth (the economist's answer to infinite growth on a finite planet) can only do so much for an economy as we continually add more valuable things to spend energy inputs on.
Ultimately the process of taking an input and making it more valuable is an application of energy.
There’s no value in doing more with less?
Take LED lighting, an absolutely enormous energy save producing better lighting than incandescent bulbs.
It’s valuable, it’s it’s the least valuable part of the value chain. A rounding error that looks good due to the immense scale of the numbers involved. Buys you some time.
Cheap energy and delivery is many times more valuable than spending that same amount of money on efficiency. One has your engineers and builders working on solving new problems - the other is just taking existing solved problems and making them more efficient.
I’d much rather be finding new and exciting ways of burning ridiculously clean and cheap megawatts of electricity than spending the same human capital on how to solve the same solved problem marginally more efficiently.
For the most part the low hanging fruit has been long picked and we have long past hit the point of diminishing returns.
Ideally you do both of course.
You can have your devs spend a year making your code run 50% more efficiently. Or you can use those same devs to make new features and simply buy 50% more cloud compute capacity. Computers are cheap and human capital is limited.
It’s interesting HN generally goes one direction here when it’s “their” economic interests on the line and the other way around when electric generation and grid capacity is the topic.
>> you can only do so much
> There’s no value
That's not a reasonable interpretation. But even so, your example's a good one:
The led is a little more intensive to make, but let's just assume it's less intensive than all the bulbs you'd need to make to burn for the same time (i'm not sure if it's true though).
Seems a slam dunk in the LED's favour right?
But it's still the same problem, you fall out of intensive growth and back to extensive growth as soon as you want more lighting. So are we saying there's a bar on how many lights we should ever want on the planet?
>Ultimately the process of taking an input and making it more valuable is an application of energy.
most of the increase in value comes out of getting more output out of the same input, which is what the application of intelligence is supposed to do. In qualitative terms this means dematerialisation. Your pocket supercomputer is more valuable than something that used to fill a stadium not because it applies more energy, but the opposite.
You used to drive your steel car with dinosaur fuel to the video rental store where you picked up plastic boxes to put into your single purpose device, now you send information through a fiber-optic cable, calculate the energy differential for that. Real civilizational progress is doing what you used to do with matter with light instead.
Fine in isolation. Now consider that we continually invent new things, new things that don't always perfectly eliminate the need for the old thing.
Now we're just making more stuff, at some point you make so much more stuff that you overwhelm the benefits of reduced inputs to make each thing.
One of those curves has a finite limit (you can't input less than zero stuff to make a thing). The other is unbounded, i desire more stuff.
The "unbounded" desire for "more stuff" drives innovation, in both the technological and economic senses. However, neo-malthusian scarcity doom arguments are typically used to rationalize limits on economic or technological growth. In the extreme scenario this can precipitate shortages and become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
>The other is unbounded
It isn't. Your demand and your attention are finite too, in fact they're so finite that competition for it is already extreme. There is so much more for you to consume out there that prices in virtual goods have largely been driven to zero. And of course while there's always a new thing, old things continuously have to go away for you to make room. What you are trying to say is that your interests are open-ended, but certainly not infinite or even increasing over any period of time.
That's exactly why energy consumption has stagnated or been falling already in rich places. Virtualisation has driven down the energy cost of your consumption far in excess of additional stuff you can pile on, and that's only going to accelerate.
AI data centers might temporarily raise energy consumption as existing infrastructure runs in parallel, but if you take the AI promises at face value it will eventually depress energy usage as it dematerialises billions of workers and infrastructure. A "dark factory" is a very early version of that.
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