How our smart devices are doing even more damage than we thought…
Fast Company is always my go-to for some great reads, especially relating back to design and up-to-date news.
“Fast Company is the world’s leading business media brand, with an editorial focus on innovation in technology, leadership, world changing ideas, creativity, and design. Written for and about the most progressive business leaders, Fast Company inspires readers to think expansively, lead with purpose, embrace change, and shape the future of business.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/about-us
I would highly recommend for a daily read, especially if you don’t have a favorite already.
An article I stumbled upon a few days ago, written by Katharine Schwab, really caught my eye. Written on June 7, 2019 -
The code that powers our lives has a hidden environmental toll
A startling new paper reveals the massive carbon footprint of machine learning
Read the full Fast Company article here.
My findings.
Asking a silly question to your smart phone or speaker can do more harm than you think.
“…the algorithms that power the software that can answer a question like this have a dark secret: The process of teaching these models to understand human language has a startlingly large carbon footprint.”
According to a paper titled Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP by Emma Strubell, Ananya Ganesh, and Andrew McCallum of the College of Information and Computer Sciences, that will be presented at the annual Association for Computational Linguistics conference in Florence, Italy, this summer,
“training one popular off-the-shelf machine translation algorithm has a similar carbon footprint to five vehicles’ entire lifetimes, including their fuel.”
NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Neuro refers to your neurology; Linguistic refers to language; programming refers to how that neural language functions. In other words, learning NLP is like learning the language of your own mind.
http://www.nlp.com/what-is-nlp/
For Emma Strubell, the lead author of this paper, the most shocking discovery of the research was when she analyzed one of her own smart models. The algorithm’s carbon footprint, 78,468 pounds of carbon dioxide, was similar in size to the carbon dioxide that the average American releases in two years.
“Strubell’s work is part of a growing awareness around carbon emissions–and how to curb them–within the design and technology world.”
How can we do our part?
We’re all trying to be more green these days. Recycling, sustainability, using the least amount of energy as possible; these are a few goals in the back of my mind that I’m constantly trying to make a reality. These are all big projects. HUGE projects. How can we help the world during our day-to-day routines?
For big companies, there are simples fixes to reduce emissions. For example,
“Photo storage services like Apple’s iCloud and Google Images could offer to delete replicate photos (do you really need the 15 selfies you took when you were bored on the train that one time?). According to the YouTube study, the platform could decrease the carbon footprint of its videos by 3% if it simply turned off the video when it is playing in a background browser tab, since it is likely that the user is only using YouTube to listen to music. That might sound insignificant, but that 3% has the same carbon emissions as 50,000 cars in a year.”
A goal for myself: enjoy summer. Sounds like a stretch? Sounds too good to be true? Not at all! By spending more time outside, without my phone or technology at all, I can do my part. We all can.
Go explore. Go enjoy mother nature.
