Comment by janalsncm
6 hours ago
Jevon’s paradox is a common talking point but it is not a law of nature. LED lightbulbs use 80% less energy than incandescent but you don’t see people using 5x more lights on their homes. The overall energy used to light homes has decreased.
And even if compute demand were perfectly elastic it’s only a good thing insofar as it drives demand for new Nvidia hardware. If tokens can be served from Apple hardware or Google hardware or Huawei hardware that doesn’t help Nvidia.
As I look up and see three lightbulbs side-by-side over my desk and another one in the lamp on the desk… which is dramatically more light than the old 100W bulb used but also lower energy consumption.
That's the rebound effect, and is fairly common. Jevons is a relatively uncommon edge case.
> LED lightbulbs use 80% less energy than incandescent but you don’t see people using 5x more lights on their homes.
I mean… some homes definitely do. You must have seen those houses that are all lit up front the outside by lawn mounted spotlights.