When energy is cheap, humanity tends to focus on two things: making things bigger and making them faster. More horsepower, more spacious houses, longer journeys—even the expectation of "always-on" digital services becomes a default right.

But when energy becomes expensive, societal aesthetics begin to shift, and the list of industry winners is reshuffled. A crisis acts like a rigid ruler, forcing everyone to relearn the lesson of "efficiency."

Since late February, conflicts between the U.S. and Iran have escalated rapidly. Airstrikes, missile attacks, and drone warfare have expanded, and Iran’s announcement of a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has directly impacted global energy supply. Oil prices have surged, shipping insurance costs have risen, and countries are discussing the release of strategic petroleum reserves.

In traditional narratives, this is seen as a typical geopolitical conflict. But when viewed over a longer timeline, history offers another interpretation: what truly drives qualitative leaps in technology is often not the abundance of energy, but its scarcity.

**Industrial "Cleansing": From Horsepower Races to Energy Efficiency Dominance**

In the autumn of 1973, the U.S. automotive industry stood at the peak of its power. Detroit’s assembly lines operated day and night, with car sales that year reaching a historic record of 9.7 million units. The stars of the road were "muscle cars" like the Ford Mustang or Pontiac Firebird. It was an era where engine displacement defined superiority: the bigger the engine, the cooler the car. Fuel consumption? It was just a negligible line item on the gas station bill.

However, in October 1973, the Fourth Middle East War broke out. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) declared an oil embargo, causing crude oil prices to surge more than fourfold within a year.

In stark contrast stood the Japanese automotive industry. Toyota, then facing soaring raw material costs, had management that keenly recognized a fundamental shift in the logic of automotive value.

In 1974, Toyota placed its bets on the Corolla model. The Corolla’s core advantage was not how fast it could go, but how efficiently it could extract mileage from every drop of gasoline.

This was not merely product competition; it was a paradigm shift in production methods. The "lean manufacturing" promoted by Japanese automakers aligned perfectly with an energy-efficiency focus, enabling Japanese brands to increase their U.S. market share from negligible to 25% within a decade. This was a fundamental "industrial gene cleansing": energy prices acted as the scissors of natural selection, cutting away the false prosperity dependent on cheap resources and leaving behind the more adaptable, efficient genes.

History often repeats itself in roughly fifty-year cycles. Today, we are in the "muscle car era" of artificial intelligence.

Over the past three years, global tech giants have engaged in an unprecedented "computing power arms race." Nvidia’s GPUs have become the digital equivalent of "large-displacement engines," with each data center consuming enough electricity to power a medium-sized city.

Much like Detroit in the 1970s, the current AI industry is built on the assumption of "infinite computational resources." But as electricity costs begin to account for over 30% of AI operational expenses, and even become the primary constraint on computing expansion, the industry's aesthetic is undergoing a dramatic shift. We see industry metrics shifting from pure "parameter scale" to "inference efficiency."

The same force that dismantled the muscle car in 1973 is now rewriting the AI industry: companies that can achieve high-efficiency output through model compression, distillation techniques, and specialized smaller models will become the "Toyotas" of the digital age.

**Spatial Revolution: When Buildings Become "Energy Machines"**

If the 1973 oil crisis first rewrote the DNA of the automotive industry, the second area forced to evolve was humanity's most mundane yet essential space: the building.

For most of the 20th century, architects rarely seriously considered one thing: whether heat could escape. The reason was simple: energy was too cheap.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, heating fuel costs in Western countries were so low they were almost negligible. Walls needed only simple insulation with a few inches of fiberglass; if it was cold in winter, people just turned the thermostat up a bit higher. Architectural design focused on lighting, structure, and aesthetics, with few seriously calculating a "building’s energy consumption."

The entire construction industry was built on an implicit premise: energy was infinite.

The 1973 oil embargo suddenly bankrupted that premise.

When oil prices quadrupled in a year, people realized for the first time: a house is not just a living space; it is a massive "energy funnel." The heating system constantly generates heat, while the walls, windows, and roof quietly leak that heat back outside.

Architects were suddenly confronted with a new problem: how to keep heat inside.

Thus, a nearly forgotten technological revolution quietly began.

In the U.S., scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California developed a new glass coating technology in the 1970s—low-emissivity glass, known today as the ubiquitous Low-E windows. This glass, coated with an ultra-thin layer of metal oxide, reflects infrared radiation: preventing indoor heat loss in winter and blocking outdoor heat in summer.

At the time, this was a technology born purely to reduce heating bills.

But half a century later, it has become one of the most fundamental energy-saving technologies in modern construction: today, over half of the windows in U.S. commercial buildings use Low-E coatings, and in the residential market, this figure exceeds 80%.

Simultaneously, a more radical architectural concept emerged—the "super-insulated house." In the 1970s, experimental buildings appeared in Europe and North America: Copenhagen’s "Zero-Energy House," Illinois’s "Low-Cal House," and Saskatchewan’s "Conservation House."

These houses had remarkably thick walls and exceptionally tight structures, almost like sealed containers. The architects' goal was simple: make a house function like a thermos flask.

By 1977, Sweden had even incorporated strict insulation standards into its building codes; Canada subsequently launched the R-2000 program, providing training and subsidies for building highly insulated homes.

Thus, modern architecture slowly learned to negotiate with the physical world.

Buildings were no longer just about art and structure; they began to function as energy machines: walls storing heat, windows regulating radiation, roofs insulating against temperature differences.

Many concepts we take for granted today—heat pumps, passive houses, solar roofs—can trace their origins back to that 1970s energy crisis.

In other words, today’s "green buildings" were not initially conceived to save the planet. They were conceived to save money.

But history often operates this way: economic pressure first alters technological pathways, and those pathways then change the direction of civilization.

**The Broken Psychological Contract: From a "Sense of Entitlement" to a "Sense of Restraint"**

The deepest impact of an energy crisis is the change it imposes on humanity’s psychological framework.

Historian H. W. Brands, studying this period, wrote that for many Americans, "the gasoline shortage itself seemed un-American." Queuing, rationing, limits—these terms seemed to belong only to war times or developing nations, not the world’s wealthiest country.

But in the autumn of 1973, this psychological contract suddenly broke. When the ritual of the "Sunday drive"—aimlessly cruising in the car—disappeared due to gas shortages, Americans realized for the first time: prosperity is not a natural state.

Energy, supply chains, international politics—these macro structures could alter ordinary lives overnight.

Thus, consumer culture began a subtle shift. Cars became smaller and more fuel-efficient; families started paying attention to heating efficiency; "energy independence" became a political slogan. On a deeper level, people began to redefine the boundaries of "consumption."

In a sense, the 1970s changed not just the energy structure, but a psychological contract for Americans: shifting from a sense of entitlement to a wariness of scarcity.

Half a century later, a similar psychological shift may be quietly occurring in another domain. This time, the subject is not gasoline, but computing power.

Over the past decade, the AI industry has been built almost on an illusion of "instant computation": that with enough GPUs and power, any problem can be solved by larger models and more data.

But as the scale of AI data centers expands dramatically, energy costs are re-emerging as a critical factor. Industry estimates suggest that by around 2027, AI data centers alone could add nearly a hundred gigawatts of new electricity demand—equivalent to the generating capacity of several medium-sized countries.

When electricity costs become a significant part of the cost structure, technological pathways change accordingly.

In recent years, AI companies competed over who had more GPUs; in the coming years, the competition may take another form: who can accomplish the same task with less computation.

Thus, a familiar industrial logic reappears. In an era of expensive energy, efficiency often matters more than scale.

Today, a series of algorithmic optimizations in the AI industry—model compression, quantized inference, distillation techniques—are attempting to reduce the energy consumed per inference.

In the chip industry, people are even starting to use a new metric to measure technological progress: performance per watt.

This implies that the future core of AI competition may no longer be the number of model parameters, but energy efficiency. If advances in AI performance do not bring improvements in performance per watt, that progress is ineffective.

**The True Legacy of Energy Crises: Civilization Relearning Efficiency**

Looking back, the 1973 oil crisis did not merely change oil prices. It taught civilization three things:

1. **Relearning how to use energy:** Shifting from waste to extreme efficiency. 2. **Relearning how to organize production:** Moving from scale expansion to precise provisioning. 3. **Redefining abundance:** True progress is not unrestrained consumption, but creating more value with fewer resources.

When horsepower is no longer the sole standard, when buildings learn to negotiate with the physical world, and when AI learns to dance between watts, human civilization truly matures.

Because when resources become scarce, society relearns an ancient yet powerful capability: living smarter.