alt Hacker NewsI work in enterprise IT and sometimes wonder if we should add the equivalent energy calculations of human effort - both productive and unproductive - that underlies these "output/cost" comparisons.
I realize it sounds inhuman, but so is working in enterprise IT! :)
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I agree wholeheartedly. It irks me when people critique automation because it uses large amounts of resources. Running a machine or a computer almost always uses far less resources than a human would to do the same task, so long as you consider the entire resource consumptions.
Growing the food that a human eats, running the air conditioning for their home, powering their lights, fueling their car, charging their phone, and all the many many things necessary to keep a human alive and productive in the 21st century are a larger resource cost than almost any machine/system that performs the same work. From an efficiency perspective, automation is almost always the answer. The actual debate comes from the ethical perspective (the innate value of human life).
Goodhart’s Law will mess all that up for you.
Only slightly joking, but someone needs to put environmental caps on software updates. Just imagine how much energy it takes for each and every discord user to download and install a 100MB update... three times a week.
Multiply that by dozens or hundreds of self-updating programs on a typical machine. Absolutely insane amounts of resources.