Researchers agree this effect is real. They do not agree on how strong it is, and that argument is still going on. So you can trust the direction, but not any exact number.
In 1865 a young English economist named William Stanley Jevons published a warning that sounded backwards. Britain was celebrating a generation of engineering triumph. James Watt's improved steam engine used far less coal for the same work, and everyone assumed efficiency would stretch the nation's coal reserves for centuries. Jevons looked at the numbers and said the opposite was happening. Every time engines became more efficient, Britain burned more coal, not less. His explanation is now known as the Jevons paradox, or more cautiously as the rebound effect. Efficiency makes each use cheaper. Cheaper uses attract more users, and create new uses nobody bothered with before. Total consumption rises. Modern economists broadly accept that rebound is real. They argue, sometimes sharply, about how large it is and about whether total consumption genuinely ends up higher than it started, which is the strong version of the claim.
When something becomes cheaper or faster to produce, the saving usually gets spent rather than banked. Make a report cheap to produce and you do not get fewer reports, you get far more of them. This is worth holding onto while every organisation adopts tools that promise to save time, because the freed capacity tends to be consumed by expanded demand rather than returned to anyone. The useful move is to decide in advance what you will do with the time a tool saves, and write it down, because if you do not, the answer will be more of whatever the tool made cheap.
Source: Jevons, The Coal Question, 1865. The modern literature on rebound effects agrees the effect exists and disputes its magnitude.
Energy and Civilization
Vaclav Smil, 2017
On how energy has actually been used across human history, by someone unusually resistant to comfortable narratives.
Draw your own card. It does not take long, and it rewards taking your time.