28. Ecological Sustainability: A Blind Spot in the Tech Community? - Taipei 2023

[Music] yeah welcome and um thank you for inviting me here I think um it's been very interesting discussions uh we've had so far uh and I hope I can highlight another perspective that I think we haven't really talked about yet and that is the ecological sustainability of the technology we are producing um I've been in the field for about 10 years I'm a more Humanities researcher um so I've been worked in the humanities for the past 10 years I wrote a PhD on algorithms but more algorithms how do people understand it how do they make sense of it so my perspective is always the user perspective and the audience perspective so I'm not a Creator um myself even though I find it interesting but I've always looked at the other side we have talked a lot about who are these people that actually participate can they make sense of it is it for too complex um and interestingly I think a lot of these discussions that we've had um today we actually had them 10 years ago when I wrote my PhD we talked about decentralization we talked about new technology making our world um extremely different um and yeah now it's 10 years later um and we have to see uh what we're doing and that's why I find this community extremely exciting and I'm extremely happy to be part of this and hope I can contribute with some thoughts uh from my own research but also what I've been thinking about um late in my work um yes I come from at Denmark um I'm originally German but I am at the rosi University in Denmark which is very close to Copenhagen so whenever you're in Copenhagen just let me know um but right now I live in shangai where I'm a guest researcher um yeah at s shangai University so I'm really trying to understand also the relationship between like what it's called like the East and the West so um I'm a little bit new to the East part but I've been in the west literature for for quite some time um and I want to start my talk with this I'm I'm not sure it now will be interesting if some of you remember but when I got really interested in technology with email we had this campaign which was called think before you print so um when email was introduced then we had this idea oh my God we need to save the environment now we have email now we have the digital uh Paradigm and now it's really important that we also not print that we don't do it twice that we we send it digitally and then at the same time we printed out so I remember myself running around and telling my parents you should not print anymore because it's important that we save the environment it's important we do something really really good um and when you read literature it comes the the digital comes with a sort of sustainability Paradigm that we thinking okay we we're doing something good for the environment um so they they come with some sort of narratives of Hope and I think I've had that through the conference I've heard it several times that we're creating this technology in terms of a better future so we kind of we have an imagination of the future and we're trying to do something for the Futures so a lot of narratives are narratives of Hope um and in Academia especially in in feminist Theory there is this concept that's been develop hope Technologies because a lot of people put their Hope on these Technologies but there's also a little bit a um a different side a backside to it because if we put hope into the future where does it leave us now like what what are we actually doing now then so these Technologies become kind of the launch pad for the future so we're solving a problem we're having right now for the future but where does it leave us now so uh the promise is typically the same I mean as I said it's a little bit the same discussions we're trying to reduce energy we're trying to reduce um enery uh consumption and Global emissions we're trying to solve Healthcare problems we're trying to solve Mobility problems and there's nothing wrong with that that that's the typical narrative H about the the Technologies but then we have everyday life um as I said like I'm a human Humanity scholar so I really work with users and at the end of the day we all tired we go home and we just want to relax and we start streaming Netflix and there's again nothing wrong with that but I think what that actually means in terms of using energy or what it means the the consequences I think they're very hidden we we're not really aware of them so what happens that newer Studies have actually shown that um uh Netflix consumption produces 20% um of the emissions of All Digital devices and it has gotten that far that the shift project states that the I um ICT uh industry produced twice as much emissions as the aviation industry so this leaves us with the question is it now better as a consumer to stay home and B bchw watch a Netflix story or should I actually go and take an airplane and go to Paris for the weekend what is now worse for the environment so if I think about myself as a sustainable person I'm kind of in this dilemma that I cannot see through the consequences and while we've talked about the aviation industry a long time we never talk about the emissions of the digital technology and I think that is a blind spot um and we need to start talking about this um we need especially to talk start talking about it because we live in this generative AI era we have talked a lot about Ai and we have talked about that uh maybe at some point um AI is going to produce their own uh tools um and Studies have shown that the sole production of the uh Chet GPT three model has used the en energy equivalent of 123 gasoline powered passenger vehicles driven for one year and this is only the production of the model we have not even used it yet um and then even a study that just came out yesterday and it needs to be peer reviewed and I know there's a lot of um uh there's a lot of different calculations on what it's actually been used but it shows that when we just create one image with um generative AI that we use as much energy as charging a phone so imagine you use you producing maybe 10 12 images until you find the right one that you like that means you have charge your phone 10 to 12 times and again I'm not saying that these numbers are are true numbers but I'm just saying there's an energy consumption that we need to be aware of and that we need to think about so I think we can agree on that we will have a rise of of energy consumption um and again this is numbers from the chiff project um so I uh it just shows that the more we produce especially the more AI we produce we actually really need more energy and that's why I think we as a community we Community we need to start think about it and we need to start think about how can we introduce this to our design Cycles how can we do um think about these in our um production Cycles especially when we talk about we want to create technology for the greater good because the greater good has also something to do with the energy we're using so this is called a a paradox our technology essentially is a part of a paradox because the better our technology gets maybe the more social maybe the more inclusive we have more people people using them and the more people are using them uh the more energy we're using so this creates some consequences that we can simply not see see through at the moment um but but again I think there is a solution and the solution is that we need to look in our design um Cycles so he's been this is an economics in economics it's William Stanley he's been the first one who has linked this use towards um technology and that's also the relationship I've been working with um over the the past um 10 years so that's why it's important to look at the relationship between the human the user the producer then these uh types of infrastructures or emerging Technologies um and then the natural world so we need to look at this relationship and we need to find out how can we redesign or redefine these types of relationships so to give you some background um this is Don eer he's a philosopher from the US and he's talked about technology life wordss so he he talks about different types of relations and the first relation he's actually termed um embodied relations where it's an i and technology and I'm looking at the world and he says that's prior to the technology we're actually producing right now he takes the example of the glasses so if if I Define my glasses as a type of Technology it's me with the glasses and we look at the word we perceive the word we experience the word that's basically basically the the most most basic relationship we can have and then in the next one he talks about the hermeneutic relations where he said okay it's me and then the technology becomes a representation of the world and whenever we measure something for example when we measure how hot or cold it is then technology represents the natural world I can see oh it's 25 degrees on my device and then technology somehow represents whatever is happening but with the technology we're producing right now he argues it's some sort of alur relations so I create a relationship with the technology but the word the natural word somehow goes in the background I have no relation to the Natural World any longer and then let me go back to the Netflix example when you bch watch something I'm not sure if you ever thought about your energy consumption at that point and if you think about oh maybe I should stop this because I'm using a lot of energy so we actually creating Technologies right now where the natural world goes so far in the background and it becomes sort of immaterial that we have no relationship uh towards anymore um and that's why he called these technology quasi others um and if we take it a step further there's another philosopher gol and he calls our Technologies we're working with communicative others because he says we're creating communicative relationships with technology but again they're disconnected from the natural world so we're not using Technologies any longer as I said my glasses to perceive the world or as when I want to um measure the temperature that symbolizes the world but we're creating relationship with that technology um and we have also we have heard a lot about this we're creating it in our minds so the question is where's the environment where's um ecology where's all that um and I think we have become extremely disconnected from it so and that's why I kind of want to reintroduce the environment so if we think about these communicative relations that we've talked about where we've diff dis um disconnected how can we reintroduce environment and I hope that is something a discussion or a dialogue we can have um and my um suggestion is that we need to make them part of meaning creating processes because communication in the end is about creating meaning it's sense making it's about uh finding out how we understand our world so it's important that we in these meaning making processes not only talk about social equality or inequality or some sort of Civil Society but it's important that we also talk about the environment and the climate so the environment and the climate becomes material again and becomes material in relation to these um Technologies so when we talk about sustainability by Design and we have talked a lot about sustainability and I'm um here taking a definition by the United Nation that right sustainability means meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs so if we think about sustainability it's so important that we not only think about social equality and Civil Society but that we also think about the environment and the climate and what does that mean I think that is something we need to Define together and and as I said I hope this is a discussion we can uh continue um right now I think when we talk about climate we talk a lot about energy consumption as I've shown you the slides in the in the beginning we talk about e-w like how what are the production cycles of the iPhones of the computers we're using those things we talk about the resources we're using we talk a little bit about use because there's also use and use I can use it a lot or maybe I can use it in sort of sustainability um ways and ways that are sustainable but of course we all a part of this because we are both we are creators of the technology but we are also users um of this type of technology so what I want to leave you with um with my talk is with these um two questions um the one question I want to give you and maybe hopefully think about is that how can we create and negotiate ecological meaning with emerging Technologies or the digital infrastructures we're producing in the context of everyday life I really want to think want you to think want us to think about the everyday life we're living the resources we're using everyday life how can we cre meaning in relation to the environment when we've talked so much about D decentralization about um having people involved people in being part of a community how can we at the same point also think about the resources we're using the climate the energy um and to give you a different example I think what's happening right now in the academic literature after um jet GDP or open a I have released um that chatboard now there's there's a lot of um work on creating algorithms that use less energy and I think it would be nice to not make the same mistake and actually think about it now rather than creating a lot of uh technology that's decentralized that thinks about the social things but that doesn't think about the environment I think it would be really great to um to to implement that in the in the production cycle right now or in the development cycle yeah and and that's the question how can ecos sustainability become a default in digital comments so as I said it's not something that comes afterwards but it's something that we think about now um right now thank you very [Music] much