While I agree with your general feelings regarding this article, I would like to point out the difference between "not green" versus simply "resource intensive"

While I agree with your general feelings regarding this article, I would like to point out the difference between "not green" versus simply "resource intensive". Brains are certainly resource intensive, but the benefits derived from those far out-weight the cost. You could say that as an investment wetware pays off. A different issue is if those are sustainable, but given that those have existed for thousands of millions of years across multiple species, we can say they are. Human interactions have not been around for such a long time, but it can be argued that since human populations can survive (and have survived) for centuries within the restrictions of resources available to local ecosystems, those are potentially "green" too, though not necessarily to the scale we see in today's world. I will not try to discuss the benefits of human interaction or civilization, but I believe most of us will agree that it is so big that it will continue to exist for as long human beings have any amount of resources beyond the bare minimum for physical survival. Computing is a tricky one though. I do not think that in its current form those are sustainable in the long term, regardless of the benefits that we may get from them. But it does not have to do so much with the per unit cost, but with the economies of scale and huge capital investment needed for semiconductor production to be cost effective. Even if operation cost keep dropping, the race to sustain the Moore's Law calls for even more expensive and environment unfriendly manufacturing processes to be relied on. For me, this is the biggest flaw in the article. A call for manufacturing hoards of dissimilar purpose-specific chips would break the economies of scale needed to make the production of electronics viable (versus the energy consumption issue). The qualifier here is that "computing" is an abstract capability, that in this day and age we happen to realize by the application of semiconductor technology. For the long term future, I hope that we will eventually move to a different, leaner and cleaner form of technology that will fulfill the same functions.