[HN Gopher] Jevons paradox
___________________________________________________________________
Jevons paradox
Author : scapecast
Score : 86 points
Date : 2023-11-03 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| jihadjihad wrote:
| A similar concept is that of induced demand [0]. When cities
| expand the number of highway lanes, for example, sometimes they
| find that traffic and congestion actually _increase_.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
| CalRobert wrote:
| Indeed, it's used as a great example of Jevon's Paradox at
| https://youtu.be/pCzCJzwrB_c?si=N8PgXPv3fCEDvdfN&t=103
| autoexec wrote:
| The way induced demand is framed sometimes as an argument for
| not expanding busy roads really bugs me. It's not that adding a
| new lane to a busy road suddenly creates the demand to drive on
| it. The "demand" already exists and simply isn't being met by
| the inadequate infrastructure.
|
| If there's an aquarium at the end of a busy road, and I'm
| extremely offended by the sight of fish, no amount of added
| lanes is going to "induce" me to want to get up on a Saturday
| and drive to the aquarium.
|
| However, if there's a opera house at the end of a busy road and
| I love the opera and want to go every weekend, inadequate
| infrastructure can make the experience driving there painful
| enough that I'll just stay home, but my desire to go there
| hasn't changed. I'd still love to see the opera and adding
| enough new lanes will mean I'm able to go.
|
| If congestion increases immediately after new lanes for traffic
| are added it's probably because the existing demand to travel
| down that particular road has been being ignored for way too
| long. As long as you're a fan of allowing people to go to the
| places they want to visit, then adding new lanes of traffic is
| a really good idea even when it results in more cars on the
| road. The goal of the larger road should be to allow more
| people to get to where they want to be, not to reduce the
| number of cars using it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| It is more complicated than this... There is a trade off
| while going to popular places. An Opera house is a big
| attraction that you tend to get tickets for so you're willing
| to spend some extra time in traffic for it... Now lower the
| time in traffic and suddenly you're deciding to get a meal a
| nice restaurant in the area too. But people not going to the
| Opera will also go to that nice restaurant that the travel
| cost has lowered. And because this is the US and cars are
| king, each one of us is taking our own set of 4 wheeled
| transportation. And that transportation needs to park
| somewhere. And this is where things tend to fall apart
| quickly. At the end of the day it would be far cheaper and
| easier for everyone if we were taking public/mass
| transportation to these busy spots, but because we don't
| design our lives around this it becomes impossible.
| autoexec wrote:
| It's also true that once a city finally stops ignoring the
| inadequate bandwidth of an extremely busy road and expands
| it, new businesses and attractions may want to be built
| along that more pleasant road leading to more people
| wanting to take the road.
|
| I agree entirely that a great public transportation system
| is a much better solution, but for places that don't have
| one and aren't going to create one, insisting that induced
| demand makes expanding roads inappropriate is just...
| wrong.
|
| Ultimately, if falls on cities to provide people with a way
| to get to where they want to be and leaving bottlenecks in
| place makes people miserable and stifles the local economy.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > and stifles the local economy.
|
| Oh no, we're going going to stifle the local economy for
| billions of dollars, and all we have to do is take on 10s
| to 100s of billion of dollars of debt to avoid it...
|
| This is just turning into a hedonistic treadmill of
| turning more and more of your space into transportation
| infrastructure by means of debt.
| autoexec wrote:
| It's hardly hedonistic to want to leave your house and
| investing in transportation infrastructure should pay for
| itself.
| kibwen wrote:
| The point is that automobile infrastructure does not pay
| for itself; it is too energy-inefficient, too upkeep-
| inefficient, and too space-inefficient. Cars do not
| scale.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > It's also true that once a city finally stops ignoring
| the inadequate bandwidth of an extremely busy road and
| expands it, new businesses and attractions may want to be
| built along that more pleasant road leading to more
| people wanting to take the road.
|
| Once you get out of your car, a street with more lanes of
| traffic is far far less pleasant to be in than a street
| with less. To use an example from Philadelphia near me,
| which of these streets would you rather spend time in?
| Vine Street, with 3 lanes of traffic in each direction
| and a freeway below in the center median?
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/3KqvmfbxLcN8wQtp9
|
| Or the much narrower 17th street, with only two lanes
| total?
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/ozmEtLGfh2hojyVo7
|
| As someone who lived nearby for about 7 years, I know
| which I'd choose.
| autoexec wrote:
| You'll notice that most of things on the two lane road
| are intended for people (shops, banks, churches) unlike
| the first road where the things are mostly for cars (gas
| stations, parking lots).
|
| There's nothing wrong with big roads designed primarily
| for cars that bring people into or away from quieter
| areas designed primarily for people where they can walk
| around and shop.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > There's nothing wrong with big roads designed primarily
| for cars that bring people into or away from quieter
| areas designed primarily for people where they can walk
| around and shop.
|
| There is in cities, because there those two things cannot
| be so neatly separated.
|
| Some historical context here: Vine Street cuts through
| Chinatown. Prior to its expansion, there were homes and
| businesses in the space that's now roadway. They were
| demolished to make way for the car.
|
| The scars of that are still visible today; if you walk
| through the neighborhood it's clear that Chinatown north
| of Vine is struggling compared to its counterpart on the
| south side, and the two sides feel cut off from one
| another.
|
| And it makes crossing more dangerous. My commute for
| years involved crossing Vine, and though I sometimes
| would bike I had to plan my route very carefully because
| there were few places where doing so would be at all
| safe.
|
| People live and work on either side of that street. There
| are senior homes within a few blocks of it.
| MalcolmDwyer wrote:
| No, the new demand _is_ induced.
|
| Among the many things people consider when buying a house or
| choosing a new place to rent, is the commute time to wherever
| they might need to go.
|
| A suburb with an hour commute from the job is low on most
| people's list. Here comes a new highway, or new highway
| lanes, and now it's only 30 minutes. Great, let's move
| there... along with 20,000 other people and within a couple
| years the commute is back to an hour.
| autoexec wrote:
| Busy roads are busy because of _existing_ demand, _new_
| demand can be created by new roads /lanes and cause the
| expanded roads to _become_ busier, but that 's a really
| good thing not a bad one. New roads should be
| planned/expanded with that in mind because the moment
| existing demand starts to exceed what the current roads can
| handle it becomes time to build new roads or expand
| existing ones again.
|
| Allowing outdated and inadequate infrastructure to make
| people miserable and hinder a thriving local economy is a
| terrible idea. Improving and adapting our roadways to meet
| the needs of a growing community is exactly what we want
| cities to do. We shouldn't use induced demand as an excuse
| to neglect that responsibility, we just have to understand
| the effect so that we can plan for it.
| firedaemon wrote:
| Mostly I think the idea of induced demand should
| encourage us to increase the availability of
| transportation in "novel" ways as opposed to just adding
| more road. You can add more road forever and just get
| more traffic. If instead you add rail, say, you satisfy
| demand _and_ avoid a concrete highway hellscape.
| autoexec wrote:
| I 100% agree. Too often though it's used as an excuse to
| not update roadways in places where there are zero
| efforts being made to introduce new public
| transportation.
|
| It's also worth noting that induced demand exists even
| for public transportation systems. A single rail line can
| solve the bandwidth problem for a longer time than a new
| lane on a highway, but if growth continues you'll still
| end up needing to add new trains and rail lines or add
| additional modes of mass transportation.
|
| Induced demand is never a reason to leave the problem of
| bad infrastructure unaddressed, it's just something we
| have to take into account as we try to improve things.
| NeoTar wrote:
| There were suggestions (pre-Covid) that the Elizabeth
| line, which increased east-west capacity in London by
| some ridiculous figure (over 50% if I recall correctly)
| could be saturated by induced demand (or if you prefer
| the realisation of suppressed demand) within six months
| of opening.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Those also have the same induced demand effect people are
| talking about. It's just that they can absorb a _lot_
| more usage than roads.
|
| Adding a passenger rail is in principle not very
| different from adding a 10-lane corridor. Including the
| problems of what those people do to enter or leave it,
| and the fact that it too can become overloaded.
|
| That said, yes, of course the rail is a much better
| option.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Let's combine two things:
|
| 1. the observation that, AFAIK, there are no instances
| anywhere in the world where adding roads or lanes to
| roads resulted in over-capacity for the roads
|
| 2. your claim that this is because of existing demand
| that was not previously being met
|
| This would appear to imply that the existing demand -
| which I'd like to call "implicit demand", because it was
| not visible via behavior until the roads were expanded -
| is in fact so large that to meet it would require
| building a road system of so vast a scope that we clearly
| would not want it.
|
| Put differently, if building roads merely exposes
| existing demands, and the 10-100x fold increase in roads
| over the last, say, century, has not yet met those
| demands, then we should conclude that it is either
| impossible to meet those existing demands or will require
| basically the total destruction of so much land that it
| will be untenable.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| Right, and I think what you're getting at is that there is a
| distinction between the _generated demand_ that the new lanes
| induce, and the _latent demand_ which was already present
| before the new lanes were added but went unsatisfied.
|
| Adding new lanes to the road allows that latent, pent-up
| demand to be satisfied--the induced/generated demand is the
| mechanism of that satisfaction.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The "induced demand" isn't a bad thing. It means more people
| are getting some utility out of them. The reason why folks
| bring up "induced demand" is when someone says that roadways
| should be expanded to reduce commute times. Commute times
| will often not be reduced: only that more people will be able
| to commute.
|
| Usually the solution then is not to optimize for road
| transportation. After a threshold, it makes sense to switch
| to a more efficient use of land. Essentially, if you added
| two more lanes to 101, it's still going to take you as long
| to get to Palo Alto.
|
| Roads are very good things. But they are very costly land-
| use-wise. So ideally you have lots of roads as a discovery
| mechanism and then place high-frequency fast transit along
| the most well-used. Most of America is in regulatory hell,
| though, so transit is slow and low-frequency, so the road may
| actually be net better.
| notatoad wrote:
| >The "demand" already exists and simply isn't being met by
| the inadequate infrastructure.
|
| the induced demand argument isn't simply that we should never
| build transportation infrastrucutre, it's that adding a lane
| to an existing road is a bad way to meet that demand because
| the traffic that one lane can carry is insufficient to exceed
| the demand that one lane will induce. yes, the road expansion
| will be "successful" in that people will use it. but if it
| was pitched as a way to improve travel times, reduce
| congestion, or improve safety, that will probably be a
| failure.
|
| if you're not going to the opera because the road is too
| busy, and the added lane releases that unmet demand, the road
| will still be just as busy as before and you still won't get
| to the opera. everybody else is doing the same math as you,
| and deciding that if the road isn't too busy they're going to
| drive. and so the road is always too busy.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| To reduce congestion you need to speed up and expand the
| slowest alternative, public transport. That is the only
| proven method to reduce congestion.
|
| The peak demand for car travel is way beyond the
| infrastructure which is possible to construct and maintain.
|
| More info:
|
| https://youtu.be/RQY6WGOoYis
| pixl97 wrote:
| I see this happen with cloud services all the time...
|
| Customer has on prem services that they do X operations with,
| we'll say 10,000 daily as an example. They look at the metrics
| and moving to cloud for that many operations would be cheaper.
| But very soon after moving to the cloud and an expandable
| infrastructure, operational costs explode. Suddenly they are
| not doing this 10k times a day, they are doing it 20 or 30k
| times a day. Whereas before before kicking off whatever job
| they were doing they were careful to ensure it was important
| and cleaning up mistakes in scripts doing while 1=1 loops
| because it had a measurable impact, after the backpressure
| disappeared, they'd do this operation without thinking about
| the costs.
| tomrod wrote:
| During my early graduate school days, I recall being fascinated
| by these paradoxes caused by wealth and substitution effects.
|
| It's a big deal! We become more efficient with something, and the
| reduction in demand results in more utilization due to low costs
| in some cases. It's a major consideration for environmental and
| humanitarian policy.
| schiffern wrote:
| > I recall being fascinated by these paradoxes caused by wealth
| and substitution effects
|
| For your intellectual safety, just be sure to exclude
| "population growth" from your list of effects. People really
| really seem to hate it when anybody points that one out.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
|
| If history is any guide, they'll strawman your "-ism" until
| even the most general observations about feedback loops and
| population become twisted into a freakishly specific (and
| easily dismissed) reinterpretation. Even today, most people
| think that historical increases in food production since the
| 1800s "disprove" the Malthusian thesis.
| toolz wrote:
| > Malthus considered population growth as inevitable whenever
| conditions improved
|
| Interesting how the most developed nations have the lowest
| birthrates. I don't think his findings in the late 1700s have
| withstood the test of time.
|
| edit: the trend also applies for population growth, not just
| birthrates
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| Malthus could not have foreseen the development of the
| Haber-Bosch process or the green revolution.
| schiffern wrote:
| He literally did. Read him. Malthus foresaw and mentioned
| the possibility of improved farming techniques. After
| all, it's not like improvements in farming hadn't
| happened before!
|
| In reply to this predictable objection, Malthus.....
| well, I suppose you'll just have to read it to find out.
| :)
|
| https://archive.org/details/essayonprincipl00malt
| toolz wrote:
| thank you for linking to source material, but I don't
| think it's very useful to reply with teasers expecting us
| to read a book to understand one tightly constrained
| topic of conversation/debate.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| Someone already answered that he in fact did foresee
| developments in food production but that is totally
| irrelevant to hist point which is: "The power of
| population is indefinitely greater than the power in the
| earth to produce subsistence for man"
| schiffern wrote:
| > Interesting how the most developed nations have the
| lowest birthrates.
|
| Hard to say this isn't merely an unstable temporary
| intermediate state. Low birthrate populations (by
| definition) are replaced by high birthrate populations, per
| evolution. Various and growing migrant crises worldwide
| seem to bear this out.
|
| The usual "solution" offered is that eventually 100% of
| nations will become "developed." This is probably fantasy
| anyway, but it's not even clear if this is a biophysical
| possibility. Thus far, the only way "developed" countries
| have been able to support their existence is by systemic
| organized theft of resources from the "developing"
| countries (this is another thing people really really don't
| like when you point it out :-D).
| pdonis wrote:
| _> the only way "developed" countries have been able to
| support their existence is by systemic organized theft of
| resources from the "developing" countries_
|
| No, this is not correct. The way developed countries
| support a high standard of living is by _creating
| enormous amounts of wealth_. That wealth wasn 't taken
| from anywhere; it _did not exist_ before the developed
| countries created it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Again, this may or may not be a transient condition...
|
| Currently we create a lot of wealth, but that wealth is
| highly pinned on farming lots of actual labor of to
| places with high population/cheap labor and keeping the
| expensive labor here.
|
| If we are unable to convert those jobs to automated tasks
| before the standards of living increase in those high
| population/poor countries then we are going to have a big
| problem, because there will not be anyone to farm that
| work off to cheaply (as we see with China starting to
| purchase cheaper labor from African countries). There
| will be a massive bout of stagflation at some point.
| pdonis wrote:
| It's quite true that wealth creation is not guaranteed,
| and that there are many ways of messing it up.
|
| That does not change the fact that wealth is created;
| there is not a fixed pool of wealth on the planet that
| will never change. There is nothing impossible about
| creating enough wealth to give everyone on the planet a
| first world standard of living. That doesn't mean it is
| guaranteed to happen; but it does mean it _can_ happen.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, I can click a button on a computer, and boom,
| you're a billionaire. But if I do it for everyone,
| without the corresponding increase in production of
| things that are wanted then inflation explodes.
|
| Some things like software don't have to follow these
| inflationary paradigms, but things like land definitely
| do. This is what I'm warning about that we're running on
| borrowed time with cheap labor unless we replace it with
| automation. All your 'wealth' will quickly disappear in
| inflation.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I can click a button on a computer, and boom, you 're
| a billionaire._
|
| So you work for the Federal Reserve? They're the ones who
| are allowed to print money. (Which, as you note, will
| cause inflation if we don't increase the production of
| goods and services. But even if we do, it is still a
| transfer of buying power from those who don't get the
| newly printed money to those who do. Which means from
| everyone who isn't a financial institution, to financial
| institutions. Which is why the financial institutions
| lobbied to get the Federal Reserve created in the first
| place.)
|
| _> things like land definitely do_
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by "inflationary paradigm".
| Land is one of the few things of economic interest that
| (a) actually does have a finite, limited supply, and (b)
| can't be replaced by other substitutes for important
| uses. But that has nothing to do with inflation. It would
| be the same if the money supply were fixed forever.
|
| _> we 're running on borrowed time with cheap labor
| unless we replace it with automation_
|
| Which will happen (in fact it has already been happening
| for decades now) due to natural economic incentives as
| labor becomes more expensive (which I agree will happen
| over time as more people gain access to a higher standard
| of living). The biggest obstacle to it continuing to
| happen is, as I said, misgovernment.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Shmaybe, but if you look into it, it sure looks like the
| "wealth creation" in the West falls primarily into one of
| the following categories:
|
| - Accounting tricks - e.g. most software-created wealth
| is here, and it's increasingly apparent that it doesn't
| improve productivity, but rather diffuse the work so it's
| hard to track, resulting only in "mysterious",
| "unexplained" drop of productivity overall;
|
| - Use of natural resource - that one has always been a
| source of wealth, because it's an actual input to the
| economy;
|
| - Population growth - i.e. the other fundamental input to
| the economy;
|
| - Outsourcing approximately all manufacturing to
| countries with cheap labor and low safety and
| environmental standards.
|
| I'm sure there's plenty of honest-to-$deity pie growing,
| but can't think of a single example right now.
| Agricultural efficiency improvement maybe?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I 'm sure there's plenty of honest-to-$deity pie
| growing, but can't think of a single example right now._
|
| You must be joking. The US produces a huge quantity of
| genuine goods and services every year. You buy groceries,
| right? That's wealth creation. You have electricity in
| your home, right? (Otherwise how would you be able to
| post here?) That's wealth creation. You buy clothes,
| household goods, etc.? I could go on and on. And since
| we're here on HN, how about all of the software that is
| created and updated by US programmers? All of that is
| wealth creation too.
|
| Of course none of this vast amount of wealth creation
| makes the news, because it's all "dog bites man" so the
| media isn't interested in it. They'd rather talk about
| the crooks and the parasites because that's what captures
| eyeballs. But that doesn't mean wealth creation isn't
| happening.
| keithwhor wrote:
| How do you define wealth? From first principles, wealth
| is just the accumulation of resources used for
| production: oil, gas, water, lumber, minerals. The next
| abstraction would be the accumulation of productive labor
| from these resources: buildings, vehicles, electronics,
| materials.
|
| How many of these things are the wealthiest nations net
| exporters of -- or at least breakeven on, eg they produce
| enough for self-sustenance?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> How do you define wealth?_
|
| The basic economic definition is that wealth is
| possibilities: the wealthier you are, the more things it
| is possible for you to choose to do.
|
| Resources and productive capacity are kinds of wealth,
| since they make it possible to do things, but not the
| only kinds.
|
| _> How many of these things are the wealthiest nations
| net exporters of_
|
| The wealthiest nations export all kinds of wealth. Wealth
| is not limited to the narrow view you are taking.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| > The basic economic definition is that wealth is
| possibilities: the wealthier you are, the more things it
| is possible for you to choose to do.
|
| Never heard of that definition, most definitely not as a
| basic economic definition. Where did you hear it?
|
| Anyways, if we use your definition of wealth then we must
| definitely define what "possibilities" in this context
| mean. To me it seems that there is far less wealth today
| than in the past. The only possibility for me right now
| is to sell my time to someone else so that I could ensure
| my survival. I can't grow my own food since I don't have
| the money for it. Can't move since I don't have money for
| it... you get the picture. It seems, by your definition,
| I'm poor as any man has ever been.
|
| If by "possibilities" you meant how many different beers
| they have on offer in my local pub then I'm one of the
| wealthiest people in the world.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Are you referring to more efficient food production leading
| to increased numbers of children (at least surviving ones)?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Even today, most people think that historical increases in
| food production since the 1800s "disprove" the Malthusian
| thesis._
|
| No, what disproves the Malthusian thesis is the simple fact
| that this...
|
| "humans had a propensity to use abundance for population
| growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living"
|
| ...is not what we actually observe. Once people are able to
| _have_ a high standard of living, as they do in the developed
| world, they start using more abundance for that instead of
| for population growth. The people on Earth who have the
| highest standard of living also have the lowest birth rates.
| schiffern wrote:
| > "humans had a propensity to use abundance for population
| growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of
| living"
|
| Is this quote directly from Malthus? Or did you copy a
| second-hand source, for which I already warned about
| ubiquitous phenomenon of erasure-by-mass-strawmanning?
|
| > Once people are able to have a high standard of living,
| as they do in the developed world, they start using more
| abundance for that instead of for population growth.
|
| And so far, the only way people are _able_ to have a high
| standard of living is by making other people far away (or
| not so far away, in some cases) have a low standard of
| living.
|
| This is the inconvenient truth of "development." After you
| finish Malthus, maybe check out _Confessions of an Economic
| Hitman._
|
| In effect, our low population growth is only possibly
| because we're "exporting" high population growth to the
| poor colonial satellite nations we rely on.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Is this quote directly from Malthus?_
|
| It's from the Wikipedia article you referenced.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> so far, the only way people are able to have a high
| standard of living is by making other people far away (or
| not so far away, in some cases) have a low standard of
| living._
|
| No, this is not correct. People in the US creating wealth
| does not at all prevent people in other places from
| creating wealth, including places from which the US
| imports resources. Nor does wealth creation in the US
| _require_ a low standard of living in other countries.
|
| The primary cause of low standard of living is
| misgovernment. People who are poor are poor because the
| governments of their countries steal everything, so no
| one has an incentive to create wealth, and the world
| community in general allows this misgovernment to
| continue, and even rewards the corrupt governments
| (Robert Mugabe was applauded at the UN's world food
| summit years ago at the same time his people were
| starving because he and his cronies were stealing all the
| food for themselves or to sell abroad on the black
| market). This could be fixed without changing wealth
| creation in developed countries at all.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > No, this is not correct. People in the US creating
| wealth does not at all prevent people in other places
| from creating wealth, including places from which the US
| imports resources. Nor does wealth creation in the US
| require a low standard of living in other countries.
|
| Asserted without evidence.
|
| Also asserted in the face of almost utter contradiction
| with the historical record.
|
| It is true that someone in the US "creating wealth" by
| baking delicious cakes does not stop someone in a country
| with lithium reserves from creating wealth through
| mining.
|
| But it is not true that someone the US "creating wealth"
| by using cheap local labor, corruption and impenetrable
| market access to mine that same lithium is not
| interfering with local wealth development.
|
| > The primary cause of low standard of living is
| misgovernment.
|
| This is absurdly myopic. Countries with low standards of
| living generally have GDP levels low enough that even
| distributing it evenly would not move them noticeably out
| of the classification. People in the world who are poor
| are poor because (a) other people have taken resources
| the poor might have used to improve their own conditions
| (b) other people have created barriers (social, civic,
| physical, cultural) to poor people accumulating wealth
| (c) other people in the world have a vested interest in
| there being poor people.
|
| Some of that is tied up with governments, some of it is
| not. Rich, selfish greedy people exist under all forms of
| government, though some forms of government deal with
| them more effectively in terms of neutering their ability
| to negatively impact a lot of people.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Confessions of an Economic Hitman_
|
| That book is a fine illustration of misgovernment and how
| it prevents people in underdeveloped countries from
| creating wealth. (And, btw, plenty of the misgovernment
| is in the US and other developed countries, not just the
| underdeveloped countries.)
|
| What it isn't is a demonstration that any of that
| misgovernment is _necessary_ in order for people in the
| US and other developed countries to create wealth. If all
| such people were thrown in jail for life tomorrow, wealth
| creation in the US and other developed countries would go
| on just fine. In fact it would probably improve, since
| shutting down the misgovernment would include doing it in
| the US, where it also impedes wealth creation.
| martopix wrote:
| When I first learned about Jevons Paradox, I thought of what a
| colleague once told me: "I believe that low-power neuromorphic
| chips is one way computational neuroscience can help use less
| fossil fuels by reducing the power consumption of AI". Because of
| the paradox, I now believe that the effect would rather be to
| make small AI devices more widespread instead, with no impact on
| total power consumption.
| pixl97 wrote:
| At the end of the day Earth has a thermodynamic budget in order
| not to experience run away heating. Moving to things like
| fusion may delay the global warming caused by carbon, but our
| hunger for more energy will eventually lead to energy use
| beyond what we can radiate away.
|
| Hopefully, 1, we get to the point we have to worry about that.
| And 2, we'll have cheap and easy access to space where we can
| move entropy intensive processes away from the planet.
| CalRobert wrote:
| As much as I was glad to see lighting become more efficient, as
| someone who enjoys seeing the night sky I was worried what the
| impact of virtually free lighting would be. And indeed, at least
| in rural Ireland the proliferation of extremely bright uplights
| which are on all night has not been great for seeing the milky
| way.
|
| Similarly, I worry that if we ever _do_ get fully self-driving
| EV's it will only serve to make it comfortable to commute from,
| say, Yosemite to Mountain View - and who wouldn't want that? Yet
| I rarely see increased congestion come up in discussions about
| FSD.
| borissk wrote:
| Interesting question.
|
| Beijing has huge problems with traffic jams and the CCP has has
| taken some extreme measures to limit the number of cars there.
| E.g. they practically don't issue registration numbers for ICE
| vehicles and there's a queue for EV registration numbers, that
| currently goes to 2035 (if you join the queue now you'll get a
| reg number in 2035).
|
| Some cities with heavy traffic in Europe and China have
| implemented rules, like only cars with even registration
| numbers are allowed to drive on Mondays.
| et-al wrote:
| In Beijing, the wealthy folks get around this rule by owning
| two cars.
| NeoTar wrote:
| When this was applied in some European city (Paris?) there
| was a joke - "The rich got around this by using two cars.
| The poor got around it by using two number-plates".
| Sharlin wrote:
| Lighting is simply something that must be regulated, just like
| everything else that has negative externalities. It's not that
| different from noise or other kinds of pollution.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Certainly, though you'd get laughed at complaining to an
| Irish council about lighting. Other places are better.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yeah, it's definitely something that's only now starting to
| get recognized as a potential problem.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Secondary effects from widespread automobile ownership already
| removed most of its benefit for most people (typically they're
| net-negative, in fact) for day-to-day activities. Full self-
| driving would at least put normal people on similar footing to
| the few who still gain significant advantage from cars (mostly
| people who can pay someone else to drive them everywhere).
| Buuuuut you're right that total time in cars might increase,
| making things overall worse--you're not exactly free to do
| _anything_ when you 're in a car, even as a passenger.
|
| ("Seems impossible, how's that work?" take commuting time and
| time worked to pay for car, insurance, fuel, and maintenance.
| Compare worked-time it takes to pay for equivalents on a
| bicycle, plus bicycle commute time if you removed all the space
| you drive past that exists only or mainly because of cars
| [which is... a _whole lot_ when you start analyzing it]. Do
| same for e.g. the grocery store and other places you regularly
| visit. You 'll probably find that most people in your city--
| including, perhaps, you--must be _losing_ time to their car,
| and likely a lot of it, when the point was to get places
| _faster_ , i.e. to save time. Cars _in an environment where
| lots of people own cars_ end up being beneficial mainly for the
| disabled and people who don 't have to drive themselves, so can
| partially reclaim that time for other activities, i.e. the
| rich. The analysis just gets more lopsided the more complete
| you try to make it--added healthcare costs, more dedicated time
| spent exercising to make up for inactivity due to cars,
| infrastructure costs, et c, there's a lot more time and money
| that can plausibly be put under the "cost of widespread car
| ownership" column. And yes, I stole this analysis from Illich--
| I ran the numbers because it seemed crazy, but he's totally
| right)
| fragmede wrote:
| > you're not exactly free to do anything when you're in a
| car, even as a passenger.
|
| Sure, not _anything_ but if I can be a passenger in the back
| seat with a driver that 's not going to crash, so I don't
| need to be a second set of eyes for them, or stay awake to
| help keep them awake, and I can watch a movie or code on my
| laptop with tethering to my phone, or just take a nap, I
| could probably put up with a multi-hour commute and I'm sure
| I'm not the only one.
| api wrote:
| Along similar lines I've been predicting that AI is going to
| increase demand for knowledge work.
|
| It may decrease demand for certain types of knowledge work, but
| the overall volume will increase.
| sorokod wrote:
| _Yet I rarely see increased congestion come up in discussions
| about FSD_
|
| It is very simple, companies invested in EV, FSD, etc. are
| doing so to make a profit from EV, FSD, etc.
|
| How those affect humanity is not their concern.
| nologic01 wrote:
| An important factor seems to be whether the underlying good or
| service is of the satiating variety [1] and how quickly does such
| satiation kick-in.
|
| E.g. producing cheap and plentiful food will increase demand up
| to a point, but once everybody becomes obese that process stops
| (and mutates into waste).
|
| If you can generate cheap and plentiful jetpacks, pretty soon the
| sky will be dark with swarms of human mosquitos criss-crossing
| the biosphere. But at some point people will have exhausted the
| time they want to dedicate to this activity.
|
| On the other hand a generic useful good such as low entropy
| energy that can be repurposed for a wide variety of uses might
| actually never saturate. That is probably what happened with
| fossil fuels.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_satiation
| skrebbel wrote:
| This is currently playing out with solar panels. They get cheaper
| and you need fewer for the same production, which increases
| demand and that continues the cycle.
|
| Just pointing this out cause the example linked is coal (bad) but
| it also works for things that are generally thought of as good.
| rozab wrote:
| I guess the implicit point the poster was getting at (and there
| always seems to be one when people post wikipedia articles on
| HN) is that the massive increases in compute efficiency (ops
| per watt) have lead to massively increased power consumption,
| often in pointless applications like crypto mining
| skrebbel wrote:
| Yeah but if that fuels increasing innovation and scale in
| solar panel manufacturing then it's still bottom line a good
| effect.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| I was introduced to this concept when working with Intel on a
| business deal. This seemed to be a guiding principle in our
| discussions as well as an ethos a lot of the Intel Capital had
| strong belief in.
| jevons_lover wrote:
| Ha. I'm married to a Jevons so scored some solid boyfriend points
| with this letter to The Economist (March 2017)...
|
| https://ibb.co/b5VLByn
| intalentive wrote:
| Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.
| hathawsh wrote:
| I enjoy how the game Factorio makes paradoxes like this clear and
| obvious. In Factorio, when you replace your coal-driven power
| infrastructure with a big array of solar panels and batteries,
| pollution (which attracts bugs in the game) falls temporarily,
| but then other polluters more than replace the original
| pollution. The only solution in the game is to keep going and
| figure out how to do better.
| rodrigosetti wrote:
| Intelligence is a resource of this type
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