Cat HicksFrom a behavioral and psychological perspective (not interested in this thread in an "arguing about whether our estimation is right" perspective lol), I think the halting, difficult, but clearly emerging work of starting to reckon with the climate costs of computing is so incredibly cool and important. Some questions I want research to ask about this include:
How does the relationship a developer has with the computing resources around them change when climate and ecology are brought into the picture? Does this produce unexpected other changes, for instance, I speculate without evidence that it might reframe your interactions with technology to be less abstract. Despite the massive crisis of climate concerns, is there a protective effect from this? Might this make some technology work feel less alienated from the world?
Do folks in software overall tend to show a "bigger is better" bias or mental model? That's a big question, but assuming this does exist, given that climate conscious computing might emphasize more targeted use of resources, would introducing climate conscious computing shift that bias? Might you begin to value smaller and more targeted solutions? Would this have a spillover effect to other areas of work that don't even have the same sustainability concern?
Might there be spillover creativity effects? It's well documented in psychology that creativity can be encouraged by constraints in problem-solving. Creativity in software problem solving is much less understood. Might this be an interesting problem space for investigating creative solutions? I bet it would be
Based on our studies' evidence about eg the high desire developers have for communal affordances in their work, and the high impact sense of belonging has for technology teams on devs' ratings of their own productivity and their teams' effectiveness, I am also willing to bet feeling part of a global movement toward sustainability could be a protective factor for developers who have less agency at work. Climate conscious computing is often framed as a loss to tech but what if it's not in this way
I guess a thing overall I find really fun to think about is "what do we think about when we think about software that's entirely outside of software" and staying only within the world of software and work as if professional employed developers aren't full human beings with families and societies who wake up and go to sleep in this shared world. And there are just so many fields that haven't been brought in enough here, climate research and health and
David Beers@grimalkina one small data point to support that hypothesis: working in solar as a SW engineer I did find psychological support in the sense of a meaningful earth-bound mission shared by my colleagues. It also motivated me to start a small company where developers would have not only that shared sustainability mission, but more agency to meet the challenge.
@davidbeers how beautiful
bsky: @daniloc.xyz@grimalkina what's so interesting to me about this line of thinking:
UNTIL ~AI~ showed up, the quest for price-performance had shifted to “how much work can we accomplish for as little wattage as possible,” because portable computing has become so central to our lives
But even with AI, this is the long term incentive. Energy is expensive, using less of it is better even from the perspective of corporate sociopathy
Making the constraint more visible gives teams better arguments to target!
Glyph@danilo @grimalkina sadly this reminds me of Dan Olson's line in Line Goes Up: "…diminishing returns are still returns, so more would always go to those with the resources to build the bigger rig"
This is not quite as linear a correspondence in non-blockchain use-cases, but in general, if you have a system that spends a watt to make 1¢, a lot of the time, you can spend another watt to make at least, say, 1.0001¢, so the incentives only start to kick in when you hit your TAM ceiling
Thomas Depierre@grimalkina i think that it is not seen as a loss by most devs i know that maintain stuff.
But they also think that a lot of the maths done on the impact is uh.
How to say that...
Quite bad in methodology.
But goshdarn we have been yelling for more than a decade about power use and how our stuff is wildly inefficient. Just that outside of experts circles, noone listen.
@grimalkina yes. Please more constraints. Lack of constraints is what doom software.