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?
drs1969 (David Smith) 🇬🇧@grimalkina are you not effectively asking 'how does silicon valley think about this?' When considering large scale software development?
This very small scale tech person ( in the UK) has looked at our carbon footprint - we do cloud - and for us the carbon was in the office commute. By miles. And that data focussed minds. But we are a charity, so pretty receptive group to that sort of change thinking.
@drs1969 sure, any research on this would have to think carefully about who it is studying and what their context is? I don't think that I've prescribed that in this thread. I am not saying "all developers necessarily think this" I am more interested in, "should there be significant portions that do, in what circumstances do we see that magnified and where do we see it changed." Hence "overall" and "tend" and "bias" which is a probabilistic, group level trend not determined destiny
@drs1969 overall yeah, I'd agree that silicon valley (although not sure that's an accurate descriptor when those are merely the HQs of global workforces) sets a lot of normative things in the software world
@grimalkina aye my silicon valley was a placeholder for (largely) US vc funded orgs. We certainly dont have an equivalent here and I don't think the EU does either.
There's a bunch of Net Zero by 20XX out there, and without exactly the thing you are trying to examine, those goals wont be met.