Carriages, energy-saving lamps, and “slow living”: Every energy crisis in history has been a “forced upgrade” of human lifestyles.

When energy is cheap, humanity loves to do two things: make things bigger, make things faster.

More horsepower, larger houses, longer journeys—even “instant” digital services are assumed as a right.

But once energy gets expensive, social aesthetics are the first to collapse, and the list of industry winners is immediately reshuffled—crisis acts like a hard ruler, forcing everyone to relearn the lesson of “efficiency.”

Since the end of February this year, US-Iran tensions have rapidly escalated. Air strikes, missiles, and drone warfare continually expand, and Iran's announcement to blockade the Strait of Hormuz directly touches the nerves of global energy supply. Oil prices soar, shipping insurance rises, countries begin discussing the release of strategic oil reserves.

In traditional narrative, this is a typical geopolitical conflict.

But if you extend the timeline, human history offers another explanation—

What truly drives transformative technological change is often not abundant energy, but energy scarcity.

Industrial Gene “Cleansing”: From Horsepower Competitions to Energy Efficiency Dominance

In the autumn of 1973, the American auto industry stood at the peak of its power.

Detroit’s assembly lines ran day and night, and that year’s car sales hit a historic record of 9.7 million units. The stars on the highways were “muscle cars” like the Ford Mustang or Pontiac Firebird. It was an era where the bigger the engine, the cooler the car. Fuel consumption? That was just a negligible sum on the gas station bill.

However, in October 1973, the Fourth Middle East War broke out. OPEC announced an oil embargo, and within just a year, crude oil prices soared more than fourfold.

In sharp contrast was the Japanese auto industry. Toyota faced huge pressure from the soaring cost of raw materials, but its management sensed that the value logic of cars had fundamentally flipped.

In 1974, Toyota bet on the Corolla model. The Corolla’s core advantage wasn’t speed, but squeezing out the maximum mileage from every drop of gasoline.

1974 Corolla (third generation), source: Toyota official website

This wasn’t just a product competition, but a dimensional reduction in production method. The “lean production” promoted by Japanese carmakers perfectly matched the energy efficiency direction, causing the market share of Japanese brands in the US to leap from negligible to 25% in ten years. This was a fundamental “industrial gene cleansing”: energy prices acted as the scissors of natural selection, cutting away the false prosperity reliant on cheap resources, leaving the more adaptable, efficient genes.

The rhythm of history often repeats itself in fifty-year cycles. Today, we are in the “muscle car era” of artificial intelligence.

Over the past three years, global tech giants have been caught in an unprecedented “computing power arms race.” NVIDIA’s GPU has become the “big engine” of the digital era, with every data center consuming enough electricity to power a medium-sized city.

Just like 1970s Detroit, the current AI industry is built on the assumption of “unlimited computing resources.” But when electricity costs begin to comprise more than 30% of AI operating expenses and become the main constraint on expanding computing, industry aesthetics are undergoing profound change. We see industry metrics shift from simple “parameter scale” to “inference energy efficiency.”

The force that destroyed muscle cars in 1973 is rewriting the AI industry: Companies able to achieve efficient output through model compression, distillation technology, and specialized small models will become the “Toyotas” of the digital age.

Spatial Revolution: When Houses Become “Energy Machines”

If the 1973 oil crisis first rewrote the genetic code of the auto industry, then the second field forced to evolve was humanity’s most everyday and overlooked space—the house.

For most of the 20th century, architects hardly thought seriously about one thing: Will heat escape? The reason was simple: energy was too cheap.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, heating fuel costs in Western countries were so low as to be almost negligible. Walls only needed a few inches of fiberglass insulation; if it felt cold in winter, just turn the thermostat higher. Architectural designs focused on lighting, structure, and aesthetics; rare was anyone who seriously calculated a building’s “energy consumption.”

The whole construction industry was built on an implicit premise: energy is unlimited.

The 1973 oil embargo abruptly tore apart that premise.

When oil prices shot up fourfold in a single year, people realized for the first time: a house is not only a living space, it’s a giant “energy funnel.” Heaters constantly generate warmth, but walls, windows, and roofs quietly send that heat outdoors.

Architects suddenly faced a brand-new question: How to keep heat inside?

Thus, a nearly forgotten technological revolution began quietly.

In America, scientists at California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed a new glass coating technology in the 1970s—low-emissivity (Low-E) glass, now ubiquitous in the construction industry. This glass is covered with a thin layer of metal oxide, capable of reflecting infrared radiation: blocking indoor heat from escaping in winter, and keeping outdoor heat out in summer.

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

But fifty years later, it has become one of the most foundational energy-saving technologies in modern construction: today, more than half of windows in American commercial buildings use Low-E coatings, while in residential markets, the proportion exceeds 80%.

Meanwhile, an even more radical architectural concept emerged—“super-insulated houses.” In the 1970s, there were experimental buildings in Europe and North America:

“Zero-energy house” in Copenhagen, Denmark; Low-Cal House in Illinois, USA; Conservation House in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Conservation House, Saskatchewan, Canada. Source: Saskatchewan Research Council

The walls were amazingly thick; the structures almost airtight, like sealed containers. The architects’ goal was simple: make a house work like a thermos.

By 1977, Sweden even wrote strict insulation standards into building codes; Canada followed with the R-2000 program, offering training and subsidies for high-insulation homes.

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

Buildings were no longer just art and structure, but began to act as energy machines: walls stored heat, windows managed radiation, roofs insulated temperature differences.

Many concepts we take for granted today—heat pumps, passive houses, solar roofs—can actually be traced back to the 1970s energy crisis.

In other words, today's "green buildings" were initially not meant to save the planet.

They were simply to save money.

But that's often how history works:

Economic pressure first changes the technology path, which then alters the direction of civilization.

The Fracture of the Psychological Contract: From “Entitlement” to “Restraint”

The deepest impact of the energy crisis was the change in human psychology.

Historian H.W. Brands wrote when studying this period:

For many Americans, “gasoline shortage itself seemed un-American.” Queuing, rationing, quotas—these words seemed only relevant to wartime or developing countries, not the world’s richest nation.

But in autumn 1973, this psychological contract abruptly broke. When rituals like the “Sunday drive” disappeared due to gasoline shortages, Americans first realized: prosperity is not a natural state.

Energy, supply chains, international politics—these grand structures can change the life of ordinary people overnight.

Thus, consumer culture began a subtle shift. Cars became smaller and more fuel-efficient; families started caring about heating efficiency; “energy independence” became a political slogan. On a deeper level, people began to rethink the boundaries of “consumption.”

In a sense, what changed in the 1970s was not just the energy structure, but Americans’ psychological contract:

From taking for granted, to being alert to scarcity.

Half a century later, a similar psychological change may be quietly taking place in another sector.

This time it’s not gasoline, but computing power.

Over the past decade, the AI industry was almost built on a fantasy of “instant computing”: as long as there were enough GPUs and electricity, any problem could be solved with larger models and more data.

But as AI data centers expand rapidly, energy costs are resurfacing. Industry estimates that by around 2027, AI data centers alone may add nearly 100 gigawatts of new power demand—equivalent to the electricity generation of several mid-sized countries.

When electricity prices enter cost structures, the technology path also changes.

In recent years, AI companies competed by possession of more GPUs; in the future, competition may transform: who can accomplish the same tasks with less computation.

Thus, a familiar industrial logic returns.

In times when energy is expensive, efficiency is often more important than scale.

Today, AI industry practices like model compression, quantized inference, distillation technology, and other optimization algorithms aim to reduce energy consumed in each inference process.

In the chip industry, people use a new metric for measuring technology progress:

Performance per watt.

This means that the core of future AI competition may no longer be the number of model parameters, but energy efficiency.

If AI performance improvements don’t bring higher per-watt efficiency, then such progress is invalid.

The True Legacy of the Energy Crisis: Civilization Relearns Efficiency

Looking back, what the 1973 oil crisis really changed wasn’t just oil prices.

It taught civilization three things:

1. Reuse energy: from wastefulness to extreme efficiency.
2. Reorganize production: from scale expansion to precise supply.
3. Redefine abundance: True progress isn’t unrestrained consumption, but creating more value with less resource.

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

Because when resources become scarce, society relearns an ancient and powerful ability: to live smarter.

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