@datarama @zzt
One of the metrics I like is the amount of time working required to be able to afford an hour of light. For most of history, artificial light was out of reach of most of the population because the effort to refine the oil for an oil lamp or make candles was more than the value of an hour of labour. A bit before the Industrial Revolution, this reached an inflection point where an hour of labour could buy you a candle that would let you work for more than an hour after sunset. This didn’t make a huge impact because most of the time spent working then was just paying for the light. Mass production of gas and, later, electricity caused massive drops in the cost of an hour of lighting. By the early 20th century, the cost of lighting was low enough that most people would use the extra time for leisure not labour.
When I was young, we used incandescent bulbs everywhere. A 60W bulb could just about light a room well enough to read but you typically wanted more. I had a 40W desk lamp (which doubled and a bedside light) and a 100W bulb in the middle of my bedroom and later two 60W spots as bedside lights and a 60W room light after we moved). The bulbs blew fairly frequently (they typically lasted 6-12 months: we had a big cupboard full of replacements that was constantly restocked). The bulbs were still not a major cost of the lighting though, the electricity was. Lighting was the largest single contributors to our electricity bill and one of the largest costs for our power bills (heating was the other and wasn’t electric).
When I went to university, there was some subsidy for compact fluorescents. We got a load of 15 W ones, which were about as bright as a 100W bulb (part of the reason people hated these was that they outright lied about the equivalence, so buying a ‘60W equivalent’ bulb made the room gloomy). I had an 8W bedside light and a 15W room light. The bulbs cost about £1.50 each, so were actually a significant part of the total cost: for a 15W bulb, being on 10% of the time for a year cost as much as the bulb.
Now, most of my house uses LED bulbs. I think the brightest are 7W? We have a small draw that has a few spare ones because the rectifiers burn out periodically but they last for years.
So, a few things about why I don’t think this meets the definition of a singularity:
First, there was rapid acceleration but it wasn’t at all smooth. Gas lamps, filament bulbs, compact fluorescents, and LEDs were all step changes.
Second, the knock-on productivity effects haven’t really changed for over 100 years. Anyone who wanted / needed to work while it was dark outside has been able to for over 100 years (at least, in affluent countries). Beyond that, the cost going down hasn’t changed the economics. And we’ve already hit diminishing returns. Going from needing to buy and candle to get dim light to a gas or electric light where you hit a switch and got light bright enough to read with was big. Going from 150W to brightly light a room to 15W was a huge improvement. But going from 15W to 7W to light the same room? It’s nice. But it’s basically a rounding error. The prior improvement moved lighting from being the biggest contributor to the electricity bill to being way down the list. The most recent one made basically no difference. If some future technology lets me light the room for 2-4W, I’ll buy it if it’s no more expensive than LEDs, but I don’t really care.
Third, it isn’t a compounding effect. The existence of CFLs did not directly cause the creation of LED bulbs, both were created in response to the same underlying economic conditions.
There is some compounding effect across ent entire economy due to increased time for people to spend in education.
