>Nothing forces the rebound effect to dominate.

Human nature does. We're like a gas, and we fill to expand the space we're in. If technology uses less power, in general, we'll just use more of it until we hit whatever natural limits are present. (usually cost, or availability) I'm not sure I'm a proponent of usage taxes, but they definitely have the right idea; people will just keep doing more things until it becomes too expensive or they are otherwise restricted. The problem you run into is how the public reacts when "they" are trying to force a bunch of limitations on you that you didn't previously need to live with. It's politically impossible, even in a case where it's the right choice.

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Arnt a day ago | parent [-]

I don't understand why "we're like a gas, and expand to fill the space we're in". What makes the simile apply to e.g. AI or 5G when it doesn't apply to others, e.g. computer prices?

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everdrive a day ago | parent [-]

I think the Apple ARM chips are a good example. They're fantastically more efficient and fantastically powerful. We _could_ take this incredible platform and say "we can probably do personal computing on 3-5 watts if we really focus on efficiency." But we don't do that. With more powerful chips, websites and apps and operating systems will get less efficient, bigger, more bloated. If there's any slack in the system we'll just take it up with crap. The chips will be faster next year so why bother making things more efficient? Repeat this process forever, and we eat up all of our efficiency gains.

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Arnt a day ago | parent | next [-]

My Apple ARM laptop has 24+ hours battery lifetime in practice, three times as much as the best laptop I had in the 2000-2015 period, and it's lighter than most of those laptops too. (Can't remember the battery lifetime of my 2015-2019 laptop.) Clearly not all efficiency gains have been eaten up.

	▲	everdrive a day ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed, it's not a perfect linear line, but if we how 2000-2015 computing requirements _and_ the Apple ARM efficiency we could be somewhere very special.

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vel0city a day ago | parent | prev [-]

A lot of households did make the change from having a few hundred watt PC with a hundred watt monitor to a couple of phones and maybe a tablet that don't use anywhere near as much energy. They use those devices all day, but overall they use less power than a few hours a week of an older desktop.