> But far from demanding more electricity personal computers have become more efficient with laptops mostly replacing large standalone boxes, and software improvements reducing waste.

If only it was true, I reckon we’re using multiple-orders of magnitude more computational per $ of business objectives simply because of the crazy abstractions. For example, I know of multiple small HFT firms that are crypto market makers with their trading bots in Python. Many banks in my country have excel macros on top of SQL extensions on top of COBOL. We’ve not reduced waste in software but rather quite the opposite.

I don’t think this is super relevant to the articles point but I think it’s an under discussed topic.

Excel has already added a =COPILOT() function. Imagine the waste of all those formulas that probably amount to some basic mathematical formula that could be run on a 386.

> We’ve not reduced waste in software but rather quite the opposite.

Indeed. But that is because we optimized (and are still optimizing) for speed of development, not much else.