Hacker News Reader

Comment by brainwad | Hacker News Reader

Or: increasing resource efficiency may encourage even more usage, as happened with coal, oil and photovoltaics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Given how heavily subsidized it is at the moment, the efficiency isn’t as important. Typically efficiency would give you more at lower cost, but with token prices so removed from actual cost that plays less of a role here.

If the inference gets an order of magnitude cheaper, labs can afford to subsidise an order of magnitude more usage for the same marketing cost. So that part of usage will, if not accelerate with efficiency, at least still grow linearly with it. And there is a substantial amount of usage at or above true costs - everyone using a 3P harness, everyone on enterprise contracts, and everyone self-hosting an open weights model in a 3P cloud.

The (any!) comparrison to photovoltaics is not acurate.Photovoltaics (PV) are primary energy producing infrastructure that produces its own fuel and is now verticly integrated into it's own supply chain, nothing other than life itself posseses this atribute. AI, is exceptionaly likely to work in exactly the opposite fashion and take its host out as it goes down.

When PVs got cheaper, more of them were sold.

PV had to prove that it was truely indispensable and also prove to have realistic prospects for improvement and volume production before investments were made, and then prices came down. AI has proven that it burns more money faster than anything else, ever. I will admit that I am an early adopter of solar, but an AI refusenic, but still there is no reasonable comparison of AI and anything outside of religion.

They improved the efficiency of coal?

Massively. Extracting more useful energy from coal has always been a goal.

Very much unlike with software. Where the goal for long while is to burn as many resources as possible on end user devices.

I assume the reference was to the Jevons paradox, as described in Jevons' 1865 book, "The Coal Question". Watt's steam engine massively increased the efficiency of coal in steam engines, which increased the use of coal fired steam engines, which increased coal consumption.

Of coal use, yes. That's what inspired this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Absolutely. Early engines were so inefficient that they could basically only be used in coal mines.

I'm no expert, but burning coal inside a coal mine sounds like a really bad idea for several reasons.

Most aspects of 18th century coal mining probably sound like really bad ideas. It's a notoriously dangerous job.

The engine would also typically be at the top of the mine, not deep inside it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com