Emissions from computing are apparently higher than for air travel, and that’ll only go up in the coming decades.
“As a society we need to start treating computational resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. We need frugal computing: achieving our aims with less energy and material.”
I see a lot of replies below that don't realize just how wasteful our computer engineering itself has become.
It's not just that we should decide whether we really need to run some application, but at a deeper level, we're now increasingly wasteful in *the way* we run software anyway.
It's the difference between talking about reducing tailpipe emissions by not taking extra trips to the store vs not using highly emitting vehicles in the first place, for all trips, vital and optional.
Computing resources have become so generous that we run software today that requires far overpowered computers to do even simple tasks. We use inefficient libraries with a ton of overhead, because it's easier or trendier to program them.
Heck, we're even guilty of that here on Fediverse. Have you see how inefficient the design of this platform is?
But... that's just the direction #computing has gone, much to the chagrin of older generations.
So much energy and other resources could be saved without any loss of user value with better #programming practices.
@lightninhopkins @volkris @Brendanjones the processing power became a lot more efficient, tho way we use it has gone the other way, people used to design their software to the insanely constrained platforms they had access to, but with the available power now, and the will to build more complex software, we abstract a lot more, use high level languages designed for ease of use, rather than performance, because computer time is cheap, programmer time is expensive.
Exactly, so my point is that when we're talking about energy use by computing, this is a huge factor in that issue.
Or in other words, computer time is cheap if you don't count the cost of emissions the paper was trying to raise awareness of.
@lightninhopkins @Brendanjones
Computer hardware has gotten much much more efficient.
But software has responded by becoming less efficient with use of the more efficient computers.
For a vague analogy, think of it like cars becoming more fuel efficient, so people spend less per gallon on fuel, so they can afford to and get used to driving more, and they may use more fuel in the end.
As software became less efficient it consumed the hardware increases in efficiency, and in my cases we ended up using more resources to do the same thing.
@volkris @Brendanjones Weren't the first computers the size of entire large rooms? We have gotten mor efficient, its been offset by the number of computers we are running.