I was actually coming to the comment section to say that I think energy usage isn’t necessarily a good metric to track progress, since we really care about “amount of stuff we can get done”, not energy usage (or even efficiency).
For example, energy usage by computers would be much higher if we had similarly powerful and useful computers that used tons of power. But what we care about expanding the number of things we can do with computers. Energy usage is sort of correlated, but if one aspect of progress is portability, including battery-life of portable computers, then energy usage may be inversely correlated with progress.
There’s similar problems with transportation, where progress is something like “ability to get things where we want them with minimal effort (including the effort involved in working to get money to pay for cars and gas)”. Since energy usage directly causes higher prices, energy usage is plausibly inversely correlated with progress. To a certain extent we expect there to be a feedback loop (if the cost goes down, people will drive more), but there’s a limit to how much people want to drive, and there’s an anti-feedback cycle, where the things that become worth it to do when the price gets cheap enough are things that are less tempting to do (people don’t want to do them as much or they would have already been doing it at the higher price).
It’s possible this all averages out and we should still see a straight line of progress, but I feel like it’s a really big assumption and depends on exactly what people’s goals are. To take an extreme case, the graph where energy usage levels off is directly and unambiguously a sign of progress for a subset of environmental activists because reducing energy usage is part of their definition of progress.
I was actually coming to the comment section to say that I think energy usage isn’t necessarily a good metric to track progress, since we really care about “amount of stuff we can get done”, not energy usage (or even efficiency).
For example, energy usage by computers would be much higher if we had similarly powerful and useful computers that used tons of power. But what we care about expanding the number of things we can do with computers. Energy usage is sort of correlated, but if one aspect of progress is portability, including battery-life of portable computers, then energy usage may be inversely correlated with progress.
There’s similar problems with transportation, where progress is something like “ability to get things where we want them with minimal effort (including the effort involved in working to get money to pay for cars and gas)”. Since energy usage directly causes higher prices, energy usage is plausibly inversely correlated with progress. To a certain extent we expect there to be a feedback loop (if the cost goes down, people will drive more), but there’s a limit to how much people want to drive, and there’s an anti-feedback cycle, where the things that become worth it to do when the price gets cheap enough are things that are less tempting to do (people don’t want to do them as much or they would have already been doing it at the higher price).
It’s possible this all averages out and we should still see a straight line of progress, but I feel like it’s a really big assumption and depends on exactly what people’s goals are. To take an extreme case, the graph where energy usage levels off is directly and unambiguously a sign of progress for a subset of environmental activists because reducing energy usage is part of their definition of progress.