thoughts on the place of computer scientists in an upcoming ecological crisis
Towards (s)low-tech computer science?
Naomod Christmas Seminar 2020
Computers are awesome 💻🎉
Important facts
Computers allow us to organize society,
Computers allow us to do science,
Computers make our lives incredibly better,
Computers are awesome.
Even better: computer science is awesome
We create more applications, more languages, more methods, more tools!
Very interesting, fun and and arguably crucial endeavor.
Computers are resource-consuming monsters 💀
4% of greenhouse effect gas come from the digital industry (in 2020),
1.6 billion smartphones are sold every year, and now IoT devices keep arriving,
Huge amount of (finite) resources must be mined from the ground
Recycling e-waste is an almost impossible task (delegated to poor countries)
Building computers require a very sophisticated supply chain.
A look at possible (digital) futures 🌡
A look at possible (digital) futures 🌡
A look at possible (digital) futures 🌡
A look at possible (digital) futures 🌡
What about us?
If we consider that research is about "inventing the future"…
which future are we currently inventing?
A look at research in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE)
Excerpts from MODELS 2020 abstracts:
Technological advances enable new kinds of smart environments exhibiting complex behaviors; smart cities are a notable example…
The increasing complexity of embedded systems renders verification of software programs more complex…
Model-Driven Engineering has been proposed to increase the productivity of developing a software system…
Our grand noble goal is to "manage complexity" through abstractions…
ie. making it easier, faster for engineers to build always more and bigger high-tech systems (eg. autonomous cars, satellites).
Which future do we (computer scientists) dream of?
Which future do we (computer scientists) dream of?
Towards "low-tech" or "slow-tech" computer science? 🌳
In summary, we are directly contributing to "high-tech", which:
relies on a world with an extreme abundance of energy and resources,
relies on stable internet, stable electricity, stable production of new devices,
makes the ecological crisis even worse (pollution, energy use).
Therefore should not we start imagining a "(s)low-tech" world:
where we stop making huge amounts of new devices every day?
where we are hence compelled to reuse old computers and electronics?
where systems function in a very unreliable environment (old machines, little or no internet, unreliable electricity)?
And as scientists, should we not start wondering what research we should be doing for such a future world?
Thank you for your attention 🙂
What do you think?
Disclaimer: this talk was voluntarily provocative, I am no climate expert and cannot predict the future… but I am worried!