2023-10-06 What to do with the time we have left

@baldur@toot.cafe recently posted:

We have, what, maybe a decade left of our current hyperconnected global tech industry left before it becomes unsustainable because of the climate crisis and we’re wasting it on generative “AI”?
That’s where we’ve decided to spend the time that’s left?
Sheesh.

I feel the same, about many things. I want to have ambulances, and hospitals, and dentistry, and warm water, drinking water from the tap… and I don't care about roads, cars, chat bots, marketing campaigns and the other bullshit. The more energy and CO₂ something needs, the harder we must press the question: is this something that we need while the world is burning?

Don't add fuel to the fire. Don't waste electricity even if it's cheap, now. It's cheap because the market is broken. The market is broken because we're not factoring in externalities. Externalities aren't factored in because some people benefit and nobody seems to suffer at first. Whales, all our wildlife, trees, clean air, clean water – all these things have been treated as zero value, their loss has not been accounted for, and that's why things that destroy them are often cheaper than the things that care about the environment.

A system that doesn't measure value with empathy – a system built and maintained by sociopaths! – is encouraging all the economic actors to find loopholes where externalities can bear the brunt of the cost because the resulting product will be so much cheaper. Nobody has to pay for the dead whales! How convenient for those who have no heart but only greed.

The more I think about it, the more I think that the root cause of all the things that go wrong is that psychopaths are in charge, designed systems of incentives and punishments that reward the exploitation of others. It's only when the many who actually have a heart that bleeds get together and change the system that we see improvements. Reduced working hours had to be fought for. The end of slavery had to be fought for. The end of child labour had to be fought for. And we will have to fight for the end of cars. We will have to fight for the end of parking lots. We will have to fight for the end of huge concrete buildings. We will have to fight for higher taxes of the rich.

If we don't, then the entire system will not degrow in good order. We will lose ambulances together with all the cars. We will lose drinking water and bridges and other critical infrastructure with all the roads.

We need to set our priorities for the time we have left.

​#Climate

---

@reidrac@social.sdf.org sent me an email wondering whether "if enough small players decided to change their workflow (e.g. reduce CI / CD, consolidate in physical servers vs containers or VMs, etc), would that make the data centers downsize after some time idling?" I suspect that the answer is no. The reason I say this is that I see how things are going at the workplace. I've been in projects where every merge request triggers a rebuild and a run of the entire test suite. This was for Java projects with over a million lines of code. The tests ran for many minutes. All this CO₂ spent boggles the mind.

Now, people doing this always have good arguments. Quality, cutting cost, and so on. Sometimes the problem is that externalities are not priced in. What they say is true because the end of the world coming closer is free. So the company is not going to change. The customer isn't going to change, either. They want software to support their business, they are prepared to pay a certain amount and to them it doesn't matter how the software is made. If we could write quality software without bugs that didn't require automated testing for the same price, they'd buy it. But as it is, nobody feels like they have any choice except to give up the system and that's not going to happen until the system breaks down or is dismantled.

– Alex