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One of my favourite economic paradoxes. It changes the way you think about efficiency and consumption.

My colleague introduced me to this idea. He had been studying ways to increase computing efficiency out of concern for the environment. Making programs more efficient would reduce energy consumption, right?

His advisor introduced him to Jevons paradox and he realized such efforts could have the exact opposite effect. So he dropped that research entirely. If you're worried about energy consumption, you need to make energy production more green, not machines more efficient.

Making data centers more efficient will probably cause us to build more data centers and use more power overall, not less.

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Unless it's something with a relatively fixed demand