13 May 23
Review & summaries of various current developments under the umbrella term “permacomputing”
ChatGPT and other AI applications such as Midjourney have pushed “Artificial Intelligence” high on the hype cycle. In this article, I want to focus specifically on the energy cost of training and using applications like ChatGPT, what their widespread adoption could mean for global CO₂ emissions, and what we could do to limit these emissions.
Key points
- Training of large AI models is not the problem
- Large-scale use of large AI models would be unsustainable
- Renewables are not making AI more sustainable
This thesis project addresses the obsolescence of technology through the lens of accessibility to public services. It explores the ageing processes of electronic devices in regards to a technological normativity that marginalizes owners of obsolete devices.
My talk slides from Resonate 2016 about false promises, complexity & dichotomies in the software world
Review & summaries of various current developments under the umbrella term “permacomputing”
ChatGPT and other AI applications such as Midjourney have pushed “Artificial Intelligence” high on the hype cycle. In this article, I want to focus specifically on the energy cost of training and using applications like ChatGPT, what their widespread adoption could mean for global CO₂ emissions, and what we could do to limit these emissions.
Key points
- Training of large AI models is not the problem
- Large-scale use of large AI models would be unsustainable
- Renewables are not making AI more sustainable
On the need for low-carbon and sustainable computing and the path towards zero-carbon computing.
This paper discusses what kinds of computer information systems might be of broad social value in the context of the increasingly severe ecological and social consequences of economic growth, and how they might be built and maintained. The first part offers a particular understanding of the ecological and social “limits” to economic growth. The second considers how this understanding can inform computer information systems design and operation and characterizes good “limits-aware” computing research.
The past few years have seen various attempts within computing, programming and hacker communities to apply ‘degrowth’ principles to their work – i.e. sketching out ways to de-couple digital technology from the growth-focused imperatives of capitalist societies. These efforts have so far progressed in a piecemeal manner, led by assorted groups with broad interests around ‘radically sustainable computing’ (Heikkilä 2021). The hope, of course, is that these initial developments might signal the beginnings of mainstream change.
This website is a solar-powered, self-hosted version of Low-tech Magazine. It has been designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.
This paper describes how principles derived from degrowth can be a useful heuristic for designing an ICT system within energy limits. It does so by discussing the design choices behind https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com, an ongoing design research project that set out to build a ’low-tech website’. This research resulted in a design which is lightweight, tailored towards older and lower-powered devices, is powered by off-grid solar energy and thus designed with energy scarcity in mind. The project shows that values and frameworks theorized within the Computing within Limits community are technically applicable to practices of web development but also identifies hurdles to their more widespread applicability.
Research on computing within limits explores the design of computing technologies that will be appropriate for a future where availability of resources is drastically reduced. In an effort to define the scope and goals of limits-aware computing, early papers discussed how such a future may come about, what challenges this future may present, and the kinds of technologies we should design given these scenarios. In this paper, we posit that these future challenges already exist today in their incipient forms. We propose that limits-aware computing research should focus on these problems to make a difference today while preparing for further future collapse.
“…we discuss a set of problems particular to computing within limits that draws on psychological and sociological barriers. The enormity of the predicaments we are facing, global climate change and resource scarcity, together with the social, cultural and national settings in which we are facing these predicaments, are seriously hampering our possibility to address them. We argue that without confronting the underlying psychology that perpetuates our current state of un-sustainability, there is little computing can hope to achieve. Furthermore, we also argue that these psychological limits to computing do not only concern the users of our systems, often portrayed as the people in need of behavioral change, but also ourselves, as researchers within computing. In this paper we start exploring what these psychological limits could be, what ideas computing for sustainability has tried but should now retire, and start discussing a way forward.”
In a setting of economic and infrastructural collapse, the inability to manufacture and maintain computing resources will be an enormous limitation on the continued use of technology. The concept of “rot” exists for both hardware and software, referring to a slow loss of functionality over time. Given a desire to maintain technological capability, we raise a variety of questions about technology use in such a scenario. How long will current hardware last through repair, robust construction, and good maintenance practices? What would software development and maintenance entail without today’s Internet infrastructure? What can be done to keep our software stable and usable for as long as possible in the face of viruses, storage degradation, and other threats?
The LIMITS workshop concerns the role of computing in human societies situated in a world of limits. As an interdisciplinary group of researchers, practitioners, and scholars, we seek to reshape the computing research agenda, grounded by an awareness that contemporary computing research is intertwined with ecological limits in general, and climate- and climate justice-related limits in particular.