[adammarples]

People always use the term 'second-order effect' to describe basically a knock-on consequence, in other words an effect, which I find slightly annoying. Especially here the example of video game streaming, this is not a second-order effect of high speed internet, this is just... people using high speed internet.

Even genuine knock-on effects don't seem right, ie. you build a road to Scotland, now Scotland has car traffic, next it has pollution, next it has sick children - these are all just consequences of the road.

In my view, a true second-order effect is one where the original effect starts being influenced by it's own consequences, which is much rarer. A good example for widespread ML in the form of stable diffusion models would be that the amount of images in the wild from stable diffusion grows so large that models start being trained more and more on their own outputs.