The dial
1× efficiency vs launch
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total spend per day
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tasks per day
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energy per day (kWh)
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The demand curve · price vs tasks (log-log)
What unlocks as it gets cheap
Efficiency is a throttle on price, not on appetite. William Jevons watched better steam engines increase Britain's coal burn in 1865, and the mechanism has not changed: when a unit of work gets cheap enough, people find new work to do with it, and total consumption rises through the efficiency gain. Whether that happens to your AI budget hangs on one question the model cannot answer: what will your people start doing once it is this cheap? Every line item in the unlock list is a human decision. So are the emissions, and so is the headcount plan that assumed "more efficient" meant "less used".