The ghost of a 19th century English economist may be haunting yet another part of the AI boom.
In 1865, William Stanley Jevons observed that when the Watt steam engine made coal use more efficient—decreasing the amount required to a task—coal consumption actually skyrocketed. More than 150 years later, one economist is citing this phenomenon, dubbed Jevons paradox, to explain why the cost of AI will continue to creep up.
