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Jevons paradox

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Re: Jevons paradox

#81

Post by scotty79 »

kgwgk wrote: post #49
scotty79 wrote: post #26

Current market panic looks like early railroad investors freaking out that someone made a faster train that goes over same tracks.

Is that really the analogy you want to use? « In 1873, greed, speculation and overinvestment in railroads sparked a financial crisis that sank the U.S. into more than five years of misery » https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/robber-baron-gamble-r...

And yet, in history, railroad is one of the few examples of bubbles that didn't ultimately popped.

You can still lose money in the greed-fear cycle even if the road leads up to unimaginable heights.

Re: Jevons paradox

#82

Post by tobmlt »

This reminds me of something I remember from college but cannot ever seem to find: "The Jevon's diagram" by which I mean a two country system, with country containing two groups: highly educated and not very educated. The two countries have very different proportions of each group, and the analysis is around free immigration vs no immigration, and shows the harm done to the larger number of less uneducated in one of the countries. Anyway, I'm not going to do a good job of describing this thing, from 20 years ago in class, here, but if anybody knows offhand what I mean and can point me at an article or source on this, I'd be very appreciative! It's bugging me from way back! (where are my notes! Silly tobmlt, not taking notes in latex back then)

Re: Jevons paradox

#83

Post by typon »

With AGI/ASI, there will come a point where this paradox breaks down: once the ASI is self-sufficient and "agentic enough", people's direct use for it will actually reduce. You won't need to "micromanage" it - and the total amount of compute it requires might actually drop drastically if the ASI improves its own efficiency much better than humans can. At that point the question becomes one of alignment: will overall consumption drop because ASI subjugates or eliminates humanity or does it grow exponentially as we use it to explore the stars.

Re: Jevons paradox

#84

Post by strobeflier »

throwmeme888 wrote: post #35
strobeflier wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on. Which do you think is more likely, that it was a normal EOY sale of a lucrative stock, or that they sold based on insider info obtained weeks before anyone else?

it was 2-3 days after deepseek paper release on Christmas Day. I read this paper too and drew the exact same conclusion (that nvda was due to decline) but I dont think its insider trading, just informed and reactive trading - not eoy profit trading either though

Fair. The existence of said paper makes this a normal trade based on publicly available information.

Re: Jevons paradox

#86

Post by mrweasel »

pjc50 wrote: post #32
mrweasel wrote: post #12

This has actually been on my mind lately and I've been looking for statistics, from Denmark, but haven't been able to find any going back far enough. My assumptions is that we in the late 1940s through the 1950s had achieved a reasonable standard of living, but perhaps not available to all. Even if we assume that everyone in a country has access to the same, high, late 1950s standard of living, but applied modern tec…

> same, high, late 1950s standard of living .. I suspect this is wildly less good than most people would expect, along with forgetting about how widely distributed it was or wasn't. Just look at the first chart here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42182497 If you could get people back to 1950s level of travel, whether in 1950s vehicles or (way better!) modern EVs, that would make a huge difference to the environmental…

> if you actually suggest measures to force that people (correctly) notice it would reduce their standard of living.

I guess people are different, the less I have to travel the higher my quality of life. Excluding the US, where things are just further apart, I do wonder why people need to move around so much. More and more jobs barely require you to leave your house. I know that the Danish government is proud that Denmark has a highly mobile workforce, meaning that we're willing to transport ourselves relatively far for work, which is a weird thing to be proud of, knowing how much that pollutes.

Re: Jevons paradox

#87

Post by suraci »

aunty_helen wrote: post #75

The simplest explanation, Jevons paradox is cope from CEOs and retail investors trying to justify the share market. People seem to have forgotten that there’s a time element involved, not a perfectly elastic and instant demand. Thinking about it another way, if it turned out it was going to cost 30x more compute to train the next generation of models than we thought due to some scaling law, would the chip share price…

the money must be happened, otherwise shit will happen

it's like we are spending 500bn for x ai needs, but suddenly, the cost fell to 1/20, now we must convince everybody there'll be x20 needs, so that the 500bn will not go missing

that is what Satya Nadella and Sam Altman are trying to achieve

the real problem:

1. will there be 20x needs for ai? 2. how much ai needs are priced now? x? 5x? or, 20x?

Re: Jevons paradox

#88

Post by aurareturn »

aunty_helen wrote: post #75

The simplest explanation, Jevons paradox is cope from CEOs and retail investors trying to justify the share market. People seem to have forgotten that there’s a time element involved, not a perfectly elastic and instant demand. Thinking about it another way, if it turned out it was going to cost 30x more compute to train the next generation of models than we thought due to some scaling law, would the chip share price…

Companies compete against each other - not themselves. It’s not like OpenAI set an internal goal of training 30x bigger and that’s it. No, OpenAI needs to compete.

If training efficiency is 30x more, then Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Mistral, Qwen, etc all get the benefit. It resets the baseline. They will not stop competing against each other just because there is a 30x efficiency improvement that everyone has access to.

Re: Jevons paradox

#89

Post by aurareturn »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #46
aurareturn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

new method was 1,000,000x more efficient would there still be more total money spent on GPUs because of it In my opinion, yes. If scaling laws continue at 1,000,000x, we will turn the whole planet (or Mercury) into a giant GPU.

Do you have a use case for your opinion? On the assumption that we’d want super intelligence to do interesting things, consider that we currently have many very smart humans and society is not maximizing their use, quite the opposite.

  Do you have a use case for your opinion?
Use the ultra smart AI to convince you that I’m right. :)

Re: Jevons paradox

#90

Post by mkleczek »

diziet_sma wrote: post #80
mkleczek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see a difference. In both cases demand increased, no?

Yes, but for subtly different reasons. In the case of induced demand, the supply curve shifts to the right (eg number of highway lanes increases) so we move to the right on demand curve (or quantity increases, eg more people drive). On the Jevon's paradox case, efficiency increases (eg fuel efficiency increases), so the _demand_ curve shifts (eg more people people drive).

Ahh so the difference is in a definition of supply.

You say drilling more oil is something different than building more efficient cars.

I would say in both cases supply of oil increased so there is no real difference.

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