Jevons Paradox [1]
> when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Las Vegas replaced the expensive incandescent lighting on the strip with cheaper to run LED equivalents. But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays.
I think the same will happen with tokens. As the cost of tokens comes down, these models will just consume more tokens.
> But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays.
People are a gas; they expand the fill the space they're in. If you give someone a big house, they'll fill it with crap. If you make food cheap, they'll eat too much, even when it harms their health.
Making things cheaper usually just makes making them more prevalent. It's why computers are not faster than 20 years ago. They're merely more capable -- developers quickly and aggressively fill up (and overflow) all that added capability until you're back in the same place you used to be.
these things you are talking about are only true due to the unbelievably LARGE marketing ~propaganda~ spending
what you're saying reflects corporation tendencies
take away the propaganda, let people live, see how they react
How would you distinguish corporation influencing consumers from corporations following consumers? One thing would be to see if there are items that are heavily advertised by corporations but that they do not succeed. You can also take items that everyone knows about, no one wants, and then launch a propaganda campaign and see what happens. Different propaganda works in different ways so one would need to try varieties. I imagine a randomly controlled trial of having various ubiquitous goods that are not heavily advertised nor heavily purchased and then randomly assigning different advertising strategies (including none). Do that in various regions, countries, ethnicities, etc, and then see what can be seen.
My guess is that advertising raises desire by a few percent in most cases. There would be some instances of a run away craze, probably with a massive rise followed by a collapse, but that most products would largely be unaffected. I assume some advertising strategies would backfire and reduce demand.
For me, I feel like most of the time it is been exposed to the existence of an item and my ability to see how it could be useful. I don't think random advertisements I come across impact me that much since most of the advertisements I see don't seem to correspond to anything I want or do or spend money on.
Humans use their imagination to figure out what choice of action leads to a future of less uncomfortability. Often times, these are choices between short term future and long term future. Advertising is a way of helping shape that argument as to what choice is to be taken, but the underlying drive is already there.
You could also look for cases where propaganda is used against consumerism and see how impactful that tends to be.
I'm not convinced. Propaganda only works when it relies on something that people are dispositionally inclined towards. eg: hating foreigners, calls towards group unity, etc.
You can't use propaganda to trick people into becoming experts at calculus, for instance.
> You can't use propaganda to trick people into becoming experts at calculus, for instance.
Perhaps not an individual instantly. But how about settling for making a generation of parents fear that there will be no future for their kids unless they get fantastic grades, and that they have to use them to go into stem?
You're right, computers are definitely the same speed as they were 20 years ago.
20 years ago is about when SSDs came to consumer PCs. Which is the last time I remember thinking that my computer became faster than the previous one was when it was new (if by computer we mean the hardware combined with a mainstream up-to-date software stack)
I can still feel performance increases, most recently was when I got an M4 Mac Mini. Compared to my M2 Air, which is no slouch by any means, there was a very perceptible improvement in latency, app opening, general task completion, and so on. But very slight, and some coming from placebo effect/marketing.
These days, I feel the most performance uplift when I switch from Windows/macOS over to a Linux or BSD installation, if only because there is so little wasted effort in running a bajillion little background tasks for crap I didn't ask for. Windows 10 on my PC is highly debloated and optimized, very little in my startup services and so on, but CachyOS on the same hardware feels leagues better.
You had SSDs in 2006? Was I missing out?
I don't think I had any in my builds until 2014ish
Your computer may not feel faster than a 20 year old PC, but CPUs have gotten way, way faster.
Compare the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D to the AMD A12-9800, you go from 4 cores to 8, and you double the power consumption. But it's not twice as fast. It's 10 times faster. Depending on the exact metric, it could be as little as twice as fast or as much as 1000 times faster, depending on the exact operations.
On top of that memory throughput between DDR4 and DDR6 is about 2.5 times faster as well.
Oh and this isn't 20 years apart, this is 7 years apart. 20 years will see almost an exponentially larger gap even still.
I kind of hoped my point would come across more clearly. Obviously my current computer is faster than one from 20 years ago. But, it doesn't really react more quickly. It just does more: higher resolution video, advanced graphics, etc. The moment we add capability we rush to use it all up. This is not _always_ bad when it comes to computing, but I wouldn't mind if people in general had more restraint.
I suppose that's true superficially, but how many of us utilize 100 percent of our CPU and GPU power.
AI datacenters, absolutely. People? Nah we probably use 10 percent for 90 percent of the time.
But when I need to compile MAME, oh boy is it nice having a fast CPU.
Right -- in the details this is heavily task dependent. If we're talking about word processing, then computing has mostly gotten worse in the past 20 years.
If we're talking about video game graphics it's a bit of a mixed bag.
If we're talking about local LLM models then you need all the power you can get.
Etc, etc.
That is OP's point. The underlying technology has gotten faster but the computer you use feels the same as 20 years ago because the software that utilizes it does a lot more too.
many computers actually feel much slower than they did 20 years ago: https://danluu.com/input-lag/
(...or over 40 years ago)
Anyone not living paycheck to paycheck is just constantly gorging on fast food?
I don't mean to be glib, but for the most part, yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/well/child-obesity-un-rep...
Obesity is nearly everywhere. In the old days, "prosperous" might have been a euphemism for "fat," as only the rich could afford to be fat. Now even people who are "food insecure" are often quite fat. Some of this of course is due to food quality, but ultimately there are no starving fat people.
How does "people will uncontrollably eat if given the chance" turn into "there are no starving fat people".
You're right that obesity is not necessarily linked to overeating . How is this relevant to your original point? Isn't it a complete contradiction to what you were saying before?
The original post was hyperbolic to the point of nonsense and now it seems we're on a completely different topic.
>You're right that obesity is not necessarily linked to overeating
This can be true, but I think some people are confused. The vast majority of the time, it is linked to overeating. There are some edge cases where there is something else going on metabolically, but most people do over eat.
> ultimately there are no starving fat people
It has been credibly hypothesized that fat people are indeed malnourished. What would you do if all your food sources were appallingly lacking in essential nutrients and the sorts of things your body craved in order to get fed? You would begin to eat more, and more and more, seeking to satisfy those cravings for nutrition. But if nutritional cravings aren't satisfied, you're still reaching for those foods, because they are faking, very accurately, the tastes and feels that you would get from something that's nutritious and good for you.
So, it stands to reason: the more fake nutrition available to someone, the more they will try and eat, and get fatter. On the other hand, if we're eating real food, perhaps those cravings will be easier to satisfy without overindulging?
>What would you do if all your food sources were appallingly lacking in essential nutrients and the sorts of things your body craved in order to get fed?
When I hit 300 lbs I might suspect there was a flaw in my reasoning.
Sure, you may be a rational actor and come to your senses, but you are also poor, you have no vehicle, and you live in a food desert. So will you realistically be up for major modifications to your lifestyle and habits?
I hear what you're saying -- I think there are a few points here:
- Obesity is not isolated to food deserts. The people in food deserts may be in a pitiable situation, but most of us are obese; not just the people in food deserts. If obesity were isolated to food deserts, or even concentrated in food deserts, I might feel differently.
- Even the people in food deserts have access to nutrition labels. One thing that makes a lot of sense is ensuring you get your vitamins, and then keeping the rest of your food cheap. In other words, the most cost-effective food regarding calorie-per-dollar might be zebra cakes, but obviously you don't actually to just buy Zebra cakes. Living on black beans and rice might not sound appealing, but it is not the path to obesity. When you live on black beans and rice, other foods are your garnish. Sparing, small servings, but present from time to time. Most breakfast cereal is also effectively just grass seed + vitamin powder, as well.
[edit]
There was a time in my life where I had very little money, and I lived on black beans and rice for quite a while. I biked and walked around the city and I was thinner than I've ever been since.
Jevon's Paradox says nothing about the size of the incremental demand though. Lighting is a great example. The US went from spending 15% of our electricity on lighting to ~4%. LEDs are maybe 5x as efficient, so that would be 3% without any change in usage. So we did see maybe a 30% increase in consumption as a result of lower prices, but that was nowhere near large enough to offset the efficiency gain in terms of overall consumption. Las Vegas may have, but that is a very small part of overall usage.
I anticipate we will see something similar with intelligence. There is probably headroom to consume 100x as much intelligence in R&D. But that isn't most of the economy. Will run of the mill service jobs increase their use of intelligence by enough to offset the effect of cheaper prices? I think that's the real question.
Intelligence is a lever, not a fluid. Power depends on how much force it can apply to specific points, not how much exists in general.
True high-intelligence outputs (Maxwell's equations, the Fourier Transform, quantum theory) are fundamentally transformative in ways that mid-high-competence (starting a generic B2B SaaS, making another CRUD app) aren't.
Which is why we've assumed we're already pretty far down the path to AI, but we really aren't. Solving random Erdős problems isn't the same as opening up a completely new kind of math/science with game changing practical applications.
I don't think you can get to that level with more compute and more tokens. I think it's going to take new higher level knowledge representations and new kinds of training to get there.
And the token count and compute may turn out to be lower than what we're using now.
Definitely not going to argue against the Jevons paradox in general, it is observed in various cases.
The lightbulb thing seems different though? Or at least it is a specific subset. Lights in Las Vegas are sort of an advertisement, right? In the sense that having the brightest or most interesting (or whatever) lights draw attention to your show, casino, hotel, whatever. It’s kind of a zero sum game in that the different shops are competing for the finite attention of a more-or-less set number of tourist. I think part of the Jevons paradox is that society generally finds more useful applications of the newly cheap thing. If the thing’s only purpose is to compete better in a competition with a set prize (all of the tourists’ money), that’s constrained in some way.
Intelligence is weird though. I guess we could eventually hit the point where, I dunno, maybe there’s some information theoretic bound where we process all of our signals as cleverly as possible and aren’t bound by intelligence anymore. Obviously we’re nowhere near that. It would be a very alien environment.
> I think the same will happen with tokens. As the cost of tokens comes down, these models will just consume more tokens.
That sounds a race to the bottom for AI companies profits.
I do not think that LEDs are high profit margin items.
Tokens for sure because we still waiting for agents talking to agents as a default. Like your agent team and very long or 24/7 running agents.
But we never scaled intelligence like this. The industrieal revolution created for the people at that time quite a huge issue / it was disruptive.
What will hapen to us though?
Sounds like a variation on the induced demand principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Related:
- Parkinson's law: "Work expands to fill the available time." https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parkinson%27s_Law
- Lewis–Mogridge position: "Traffic expands to meet the available road space." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_positio...
And I pretty much just plain agree, this is exactly what will happen.
I don't think there's anything wrong with it (in isolation) either, though I do already find myself pointing out that we're misusing LLMs at work sometimes (most notably, a recent mini project could have been a jinja template - and it did become one thanks to me pushing back on this). Abundance is one thing, waste and misuse is another.
Also Jevon's Paradox: the more efficient a system becomes, the more it gets used, making it use more resources rather than less.
Turns out Grey Goo was just thermal paste