I Have an Idea to Cut the Digital Footprint by 4x
summary
Tristan Nitot argues that instead of relying on continued hardware speedups from Moore’s Law, the software industry should run organized, large-scale optimization efforts (his “erOOM” principle) to reduce digital environmental impact. He cites that hardware manufacturing causes about 75% of the sector’s footprint and shows there are huge, often-neglected performance gains in code (one Python script was sped up by 408 million×), so improving software efficiency by modest factors over time could free up resources, avoid device replacement, and cut e-waste and emissions.
AI-written summary · about