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by MyFirstSass 733 days ago
I agree, also think about just how much paper one should print/buy in bookform to get the same data.

That said Jevons Paradox seems to be a hardcoded feature of the physical underpinnings of modern society, so we're probably headed for some sort of "busybody" machine world with AI's everywhere that are highly efficient but also highly wasteful.

Very few modern process so far has lead to more efficient / scarcer use of earths resources, well mirrored in the ever increasing layers of abstraction in computing where a supercomputer at home can have trouble rendering a basic desktop interface without latency these days.
4 comments
robertlagrant 733 days ago
> Very few modern process so far has lead to more efficient / scarcer use of earths resources

I think that's not true. The amount of material needed to make a computer, and the power to drive it, has gone down incredibly since valve-based, room-sized computers, alongside the simultaneous massive increase in power.

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corinroyal 732 days ago
And there are many more of them.
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rightbyte 733 days ago
> the ever increasing layers of abstraction in computing where a supercomputer at home can have trouble rendering a basic desktop interface without latency these days.

This is such an embarrassment. It is lunacy that a modern desktop OS feels more sluggish than a late 90s box.

I wonder how much of the perceived lag in modern OSes would be mitigated by a buzzing chunking HD or floppy though. Like you could hear the computer working.

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squigz 732 days ago
> Very few modern process so far has lead to more efficient / scarcer use of earths resources,

Scarcer? Probably right. More efficient? That seems very, very wrong. We're constantly looking for more efficient ways of doing and building things - if you'd like to frame this in a cynical way, look at it like this: businesses/industries are always looking to reduce costs. Sometimes this is done by firing thousands of people, sometimes this is by using more efficient materials/processes.

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zekrioca 732 days ago
> Very few modern process so far has lead to more efficient / scarcer use of earths resources

Could you list some of these processes you are referring to?

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