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To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution
- 3xblah 7y agoWhy is this flagged?
- viburnum 7y agoBanning adtech would be a good start.
- erentz 7y agoThat sounds like a sensible way to go about it to me. Suddenly all those services that nobody would actually pay for, that are simply designed to hook people and consume their time, would go away. A whole lot of services that people would actually pay for would suddenly change in focus because now they wouldn’t be driven my ad metrics and engagement metrics. E.g. You’d be paying for email so your email provider would just be a damn good email provider. So on.
- aiCeivi9 7y agoI hoped huge popularity of adblock would do the same, without the need for regulation. No need for clickbait title when visitors are only a cost.
- kgwxd 7y agoIf Mobile Safari and Chrome for Android supported extensions, it probably would already be ubiquitous.
- rubinelli 7y agoI switched to Firefox for Android after getting tired of ads that redirected to a landing page or Google Play and prevented me from actually using the site I wanted.
- rwz 7y agoMobile safari does support adblocks. https://1blocker.com/ https://1blocker.com/ seems to be the one most people recommend (I personally haven't tried it)
- kgwxd 7y agoDoes it have the ability to do ad/tracker blocking properly, or is it cripple in some way that still makes the data ads/trackers are able to collect valuable?
- WhompingWindows 7y agoThe author doesn't mention decarbonizing electricity in the first few paragraphs. He simply claims ML is driven by fossil-fuel electricity, when in reality the electricity mix for computation is increasingly green over time. Since computers don't need anything except electrons to run, it's all about power sector emissions here, and that's a bright spot in climate relative to transportation, industry, and agriculture emissions. It'd be far more effective to have a Renewables revolution which pushes the scale of wind, solar, and batteries much higher. That would be far more cost-effective than a Luddite revolution which would ban computationally and data intensive practices in all the most valuable companies.
- kordlessagain 7y agoThe author also doesn't mention black holes, but there's a huge one at the center of our galaxy which will gladly do away with us and all our problems. Electron arguments aside, computers need matter and a lot of that matter in them is rare, which requires things like strip mining and other non-Earth-friendly activities. If we manage to pull off a walking/talking/joke cracking AI, it and its little AI buds will likely demand every erg of power they can get. Sorta like my dog at dinner time. Also, the amount of compute we are creating is accelerating at a non-linear rate, which is why there was a discussion about Bitcoin using so much energy at such and such a point in time in the future. The speed of networking is not increasing at the same rate as compute.
- vertis 7y agoThe article didn't really make that argument though. It could have gone into things like your strip mining example and that would have been better than a lot of the arguments used.
- erentz 7y agoIt’s interesting to see this article for me because it is similar to the “Bitcoin is bad because CO2” articles and arguments that arise from time to time. To which I’ve unsuccessfully attempted to argue you can’t really say Bitcoin is bad and shouldn’t be allowed to exist for that reason without also agreeing that other stupid things we do with computers should suffer the same fate. Which surprisingly attracts a fair amount of defenders for the Snapchat et-als. What we can do is to be neutral to how it’s used, and instead make sure that electricity is appropriately priced to cover its externalities. That means a carbon tax. The same solution is still the right one for Bitcoin as it is for other silly computer uses mentioned in this article. If it becomes too expensive to deliver Snapchat when electricity is properly priced then Snapchat won’t exist. So on.
- davidw 7y ago> That means a carbon tax. This seems like the most sensible route, rather than trying to dictate what is 'ok' and what is not.
- helen___keller 7y agoThe pluses about a carbon tax is that it also affects the more invisible ways that we are killing the environment - hating on big tech is cool, hating on the car you use to get to work isn't as cool. Both should be taxed relative to their emissions.
- noobermin 7y agoThe ironic bit is personal cars account for 20% of the US emissions already. Transportation is the largest category, at near 30%. Electricity is a close second, but pretending data centers use more than say the air conditioners across the US is probably false. Sure, per individual, data centers might use more, but something like better insulating houses would probably do more on net for emissions than just dismantling one data center, and ditching your car and riding public transit will probably do more than that.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
- maliker 7y agoMy cellphone (pocket computer) needs 10 Wh to run all day. For the same amount of energy, the lights in my office will run for 6 minutes. I'm not buying this "must decomputerize" pitch.
- KaiserPro 7y agoyes, but the masts, wifi, network and servers to support that consume a lot more than 10Wh
- quaquaqua1 7y agoHow much do they use compared to 24 hours of constant, valueless office lighting?
- maliker 7y agoI'd guess the energy costs would be similar since it's roughly the same hardware (CPUs, memory, radio transmitters) but minus the display.
- fock 7y agojust having a lot higher transmission power and a lot of supporting hardware to keep things running for seasons (have you ever used your mobile phone in -10°C for an extended time - could you?) and years. I just did a little googling and found something like "total power consumption of all mobile phones in India"x15 (can't get the link, because of, well there's another comment for that...)
- alkonaut 7y agoStop computering in places where fossile fuel is used for electricity. Build datacenters next to cheap renewable or nuclear energy and access cold air and water. There are hundreds of abandoned industry sites near lakes and rivers in Northern Europe for example.
- ebetica0 7y agoBelieve it or not, cooling is almost never the bottleneck, aircooled datacenters can be built in relatively warm places like virginia. The infrastructure for datacenters is often the bottleneck - each one takes up the electricity of a small town and many out-of-the-way places don't have the infrastructure set up to support such things, nor do the local renewables provide enough energy to run the datacenters.
- alkonaut 7y agoYes the data enters need to be built in small towns with the energy production large cities or small countries, such as Facebook near the massive hydro plants in Luleå, Sweden.
- KaiserPro 7y agoAlas, the author failed to do adequate research before getting on their high horse. Yes, cloud computing sucks power (which is then vented to the outside world, it could be recycled _and_ cut latency) but you know what pushes out more CO2? Poor house insulation.
- vertis 7y agoThis is what this article says to me. A poorly researched piece. I'm not unsympathetic to the need to run computing from renewable energy, but this article seems like a stretch, especially when it tries to link in government surveillance, etc.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago> Poor house insulation And you know what emits more CO_2 than poor insulation? Transport! And what emits more CO_2 than transport? China! With that logic, we'll never cut emissions anywhere.
- KaiserPro 7y agoSo you're saying that insulation, which makes an occupant more comfortable, and spending less money on energy, is going to be more popular than taking away all computing and plunging everyone into the 1950s? gotcha.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoNo, I'm not saying that, evidenced by the fact that I didn't say that, and that saying that would be stupid.
- saeranv 7y agoThere are a couple of different facets to this that the article ignores. The energy consumed by computers can be offset by recovering waste heat to offset space or domestic hot water heating (which is the bulk of your energy consumption in colder climates). You can do this at a building scale, and even at an urban scale with the use of district energy systems.
- Robotbeat 7y agoThere's a surprising amount you can do with just 8-bit microcontrollers which on average (using extensive low-power mode) use less energy than a housefly. Performance can be as good as 1 microwatt per MIPS. We could run most "smart device" applications off of those little solar cells used for calculators. For house applications, virtually any kind of efficiency gain that computerization gives us would offset the energy consumed in computation. The problem is not the presence of computing, it's that fossil energy does not pay for its externalities. Which isn't to say that computation-intensive ads aren't the worst thing ever.... And it does seem that some of the most hype-driven applications of digitization rely on exceedingly (and often intentionally) inefficient algorithms (blockchain and deep learning), but overall digitization can often be done with very little energy usage for the same benefit. I'm reminded of this cellphone that works on about 4 milliwatts. (although granted, it's using wireless electricity) https://www.wired.com/story/this-cell-phone-can-make-calls-even-without-a-battery/ https://www.wired.com/story/this-cell-phone-can-make-calls-e...
- merpnderp 7y agoNo one is voluntarily giving up progress, ML or not. The far easier sell to the public is a faster move to nuclear, wind, and solar, with battery powered cars. Then we won't need a Luddite revolution, and progress can continue making lives better.
- russdill 7y ago"Computers are stupid: babies know what a face is within the first few months of being alive. For a computer to know what a face is, it must learn by looking at millions of pictures of faces." Actually this is a completely inaccurate representation. The network to understand a human face can be transferred to a computer in milliseconds. The network to understand a human face gets baked into a human over many many months. Developing that network took a computer millions of images and several hours. Developing that network took biology many eons and billions of lifeforms.
- russdill 7y agoThis article is completely wrong headed. Any profit heavy use of energy can be a boon to decarbonization. The price of renewables has been plummeting due mostly to economy of scale but also to funding of new developments. At current prices, it only takes a nudge of incentive or regulation to push new energy use to renewables. And it's a feedback loop, the more renewables get used, the cheaper their production becomes.
- russdill 7y agoGovernments that continue to subsidize fossil fuel industries while failing to properly incentivize renewable or regulate/tax carbon emissions are the thing that holds the feedback loop back.
- joshmarinacci 7y agoI appreciate the sentiment but this article is riddled with factual errors. 1) digitization (which includes tracking objects in the real world with IoT tech) increases efficiency, which results in moving fewer real objects around in the world, thus reducing total energy consumption. Think of Netflix vs manufacturing and shipping DVDs to stores then driving to the store to buy them. 2) data centers are far from the biggest carbon creators. Transportation and construction are, by far, #1 3) data centers can run off green energy. Combustion engine cars cannot. 4) data centers can be built in far away places that provide the most efficient and greenest energy
- skitout 7y ago1) Increase efficiency sometime/often lead to rebound effect in our current system... When it comes to Netflix, current consumption replace both a) old renting a film system, and b)TV. You seems to overestimate the energy/pollution cost of a) (which can run on green energy too) and ignored b) 2)Sure, but data center consumption are added to transportation, construction... 3)Electric car can run on green energy too... does not change point 2) 4) You still try to compensate 2). And even data center running on green energy needs ressources and have effect. The idea is not to not to get ride of digitization, but to keep in mind its consequences and don't see it as a magic thing that will solve all our problem and have no bad consequences
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoProductivity (reciprocal to your efficiency) has been surprisingly flat in exactly the timeframe of about 1980 to today that we have seen digitisation taking hold: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNT8FsPVu0No9lNaKo7dBq5xovib7g:1568831632309&q=productivity&chips=q:productivity,g_1:growth:aXLEkvxEHno%3D&usg=AI4_-kTZ7IsxURJ9aLa04HF_1oWGOiAaeA&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi5tZ-hgdvkAhUSDWMBHZjuD5wQ4lYIVSgV&biw=1722&bih=822&dpr=1#imgrc=GssmqQGTnOGgEM https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&...:
- gus_massa 7y agoWhat about a proposal to make journalist write their articles with a typewriter? EDIT: Following the general rquest of writing substantive comments, let's extend this. The problem is that the authors see the cost of computers in other applications, but he doesn't see the benefits. For example using machine learning to detect face has a cost, but it can be applied to many things. From trivial applications like decorate your face in the phone to security applications like face recognition of justice fugitives, to more realistic faces in movies to deep fakes. You may like some of them and dislike other, but for some people the new technology provides benefits that hopefully are most than the cost. For a journalist, probably the most important use of a computer is to write an article. Perhaps also to keep the small parts of info that must put in the article. Make some research by internet instead of traveling to a library. And modern cellphones are quite a powerful computer. You can perhaps replace the cellphone by a line phone, use a lot of cards for contacts and store information. But I think that the journalist will see immediately the benefits of using a computer to write the articles instead of a typewriter.