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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 9837469" data-attributes="member: 177">Let me give a concrete example:  Fluorescent light bulbs.Fluorescent bulbs are an efficiency improvement over the prior incandescent bulbs.  More lumens of light out for fewer kilowatt-hours of electrical energy in.  They were marketed and bought with the idea that public buildings of all sorts could reduce their fossil-fuel energy costs by using more efficient lighting.But, it turns out, as fluorescent bulbs rolled out, electrical use on lighting INCREASED.  Broadly speaking, we lit more areas, more brightly, and then left the lights burning when nobody was present - because it was cheap!  Increase of use blew away any carbon emission savings you'd expect from efficiency.This is broadly true in many places - increases in efficiency don't result in savings, but instead drive increased use, much of which is superfluous.I did - entire workflow instead of atomic task.  Like, look at a software project, from instantiation to completion of the entire project.  One team writes their own code, the other freely uses AI code generation.  While you can note AI code generation tasks going quickly, you also see the bug counts rise, and rework due to fragile or ill-conceived code arise later in the project.Generative AI is used in a context, and it is not enough to look at the use itself, but the impact of that use on the rest of the context, to accurately judge efficiency.</blockquote>

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