Jevons’s paradox is real and observable in a range of other markets. Consider the example of lighting. William Nordhaus, a Nobel-prizewinning economist, has calculated that a Babylonian oil lamp, powered by sesame oil, produced about 0.06 lumens of light per watt of energy. That compares with up to 110 lumens for a modern light-emitting diode. The world has not responded to this dramatic improvement in energy efficiency by enjoying the same amount of light as a Babylonian at lower cost. Instead, it has banished darkness completely, whether through more bedroom lamps than could have been imagined in ancient Mesopotamia or the Las Vegas sphere, which provides passersby with the chance to see a 112-metre-tall incandescent emoji. Urban light is now so cheap and so abundant that many consider it to be a pollutant.
Jevons paradox applied to generative AI in worship: the more technology enables art in spiritual contexts, the more attention shifts toward amazement at the technology itself rather than the spiritual experience it was meant to serve. From a theological standpoint, the only thing that genuinely competes with what technology can instrumentally produce is something technology cannot produce at all — transcendence, testimony, encounter. This creates an interesting asymmetry for technologists: the only real competitor to a capitalist efficiency mindset is a yearning for something that resists commodification entirely.The ability of DeepSeek’s model to perform about as well as more compute-hungry American AI shows that data centres are more productive than previously thought, rather than less. Expect, the logic goes, more investment in data centres and so on than you did before. Although this idea should provide tech tycoons with some solace, they still ought to worry. The Jevons paradox is a form of a broader phenomenon known as “rebound effects”. These are typically not large enough to fully offset savings from improved efficiency.
The Jevons paradox occurs when the sum of all the rebounds is larger than the initial energy savings—and it is really quite rare. How confident should Mr Nadella be that AI will turn out to be one of the instances where the Jevons paradox applies? The overall size of a rebound effect ultimately depends on the structure of demand: if the good in question can easily substitute for others, then the bounce-back will be bigger. If it is a luxury good—one for which demand rises faster than income—then again there will be more of a rebound effect
Film and stories may be one category of luxury good where Jevons paradox applies. A24 specializes in luxury stories — making bets on the smaller, harder-to-find narratives, which implies a greater need for editorial tools. The business case: prototype tools that rely on sparse connections and interoperability rather than scale, because this kind of luxury is increasingly accessible to more creators and merits deeper technological bets than the lowest-hanging fruit. ai-ux A further byproduct of this paradox applies to spiritual and cultural pursuit — as security and worldview become more accessible, demand rises for the luxury good of spiritual experience, which is a cultural product normally reserved for those with the deepest familiarity. What it means to be human in this environment may evolve toward making accessible the slim connections between truths, rather than assuming engagement requires deep institutional familiarity with any given discourse. faiththe rebound effect is also more significant for poorer households than richer ones, since richer ones are already closer to their desired temperatur
expectations rather than reduces costs, as is typical in health care, then chatbots will make up an ever larger proportion of spending. At the moment, that looks unlikely. America’s Census Bureau finds that only 5% of American firms currently use AI and 7% have plans to adopt it in the future. Many others find the tech difficult to use or irrelevant to their line of business. “Coal in truth stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities,” Jevons wrote in 1865. “It is the material energy of the country—the universal aid—the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy.” His paradox applied to the black fuel because it was energy that was the fundamental driving force of the industrial economy. For the moment, at least, the tools produced by hyperscalers are nothing of the sort.
Pinning economic projections on chatbots barely scrapes the potential of AI. The real bet is on interfaces enabled by AI, not on solutions shaped for problems that happen to fit a chatbot form factor. Chatbots are like low-dosage dosimeters for measuring radioactivity — they register something, but they are not the phenomenon.
