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
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.