
To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution - viburnum
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/17/tech-climate-change-luddites-data
======
erentz
It’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.

~~~
maximente
carbon taxes are regressive insofar as the poor spend a larger % of their
income on fuels than the rich and this is often not negotiable - people can't
choose to e.g. not commute half an hour to work when they don't have much
disposable income to start with, whereas the rich can generally pay for
whatever quantity they want to consume already.

so the point of the tax (reduce consumption) unfairly hits the poor.

~~~
xvedejas
A Carbon tax would also disproportionately help the poor, especially the
global poor, so it's not fair to call it regressive without finding a way to
put some numbers on both the costs and benefits. Besides, the money gained
from a carbon tax isn't lost, it can be reinvested in things like public
transit infrastructure.

~~~
Someone
You could even use it for a universal basic income. It wouldn’t be enough to
live from, but could nudge people to, for example, spend a weekend in “nice
city a 100 km train ride away”, rather than “nice city a 2,000 km airplane
flight away”.

~~~
noobermin
You'd have to have trains for people to ride. The US systematically dismantled
trains and made highways in their place.

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maliker
My 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
yes, but the masts, wifi, network and servers to support that consume a lot
more than 10Wh

~~~
quaquaqua1
How much do they use compared to 24 hours of constant, valueless office
lighting?

~~~
kryogen1c
Total, all-in energy costs is actually a pretty interesting question and
intellectual exercise. Paint is actually super high on the list

------
KaiserPro
Alas, 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.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
> 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
So 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
No, I'm not saying that, evidenced by the fact that I didn't say that, and
that saying that would be stupid.

------
Robotbeat
There'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-e...](https://www.wired.com/story/this-cell-phone-can-make-calls-even-
without-a-battery/)

------
joshmarinacci
I 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

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
Productivity (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&...](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):

------
WhompingWindows
The 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
The 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
The 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.

------
russdill
"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.

------
gus_massa
What 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.

------
alkonaut
Stop 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
Believe 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
Yes 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.

------
merpnderp
No 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
This 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
Governments 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.

------
saeranv
There 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.

------
viburnum
Banning adtech would be a good start.

~~~
erentz
That 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
I 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
If Mobile Safari and Chrome for Android supported extensions, it probably
would already be ubiquitous.

~~~
rwz
Mobile 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
Does 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?

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3xblah
Why is this flagged?

