One of the many reasons I moved to the margins of the tech industry this year is because I have first-hand experiences with the costs of technology. When artificial intelligence came to the masses, many of my peers were using these tools uncritically, and even eagerly. This is par for the course. As we were trained to move our computing to the cloud and away from devices we could see and hold, we also began to remove ourselves even further away from the material, physical, and earthly costs of technology. With the consequences of computation hidden behind dashboards and single sign-ons, software engineers no longer see the gallons of water, kilowatts of energy, or hours of human labor required to make their chatbots pass a Turing test.
I have no such luxury. I come from an ancient family of farmers from the West Africas, where we are trained to count the costs of our labor. And even though I am separated by an ocean and two generations, the legacy of cost-counting remains with me and my community of African immigrants, not just in the Americas, but all over the world. Our families know how to use and reuse plastic bags for grocery shopping, how to transform an ice cream bucket into a soup container, how to squeeze dollars from fifteen cents. This is not frugal living. This is an innate understanding that our resources are not infinite; they are renewable. The knowledge of renewal has moved from tilling soil and saving seeds to making sure our resources last for generations to come.
Everything the tech industry is doing today flies in the face of that. From the way we choose to use beefier servers instead of writing better code, to the way the developer's unit of work is measured and exploited, the industry does not reward physical or metaphysical renewal. Again, this is par for the course. The technologies that we are being trained to use are not renewable technologies. They are extractive and damaging, not just to the human psyche, but to the earthly resources that we all need to survive this planet: water, air, land. Artificial intelligence may be artifices of computing, but the costs to our land, to our water supply, to our imagination are not made up. And when you start seeing those costs stack up, you can't unsee them.
The ability to change the trajectory of non-renewable software engineering and computing doesn't actually lie in any singular tech company. It's at level of the developer, the computer scientist, the engineer, the tech worker who is much closer to the costs of the tech than any company owner or sector leader will ever be. And it's up to developers to choose the renewable path. I have some idea of what that can look like, but not all the ideas, so I invite us all to the renewable path, one conversation at a time.