Green Computing and Future Generations Essay

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Green Computing

Limits to Growth

E-Waste

It has become increasingly clear that much of society needs to implement more sustainable practices to avoid many of problems that the next generations will face. These challenges will include many ecological and social factors. If the world continues consuming resources at its current pace, non-renewable resources will eventually run out. Also, considering the exponential population growth of humans, we are beginning to approach the natural limitations that the Earth's natural systems can support. As such, it behooves us, as a species, to make the most efficient and effective use of our resources as possible. One aspect to this collective effort to adopt more sustainable practices will involve computing.

There are many aspects to computing that need to be examined through the lens of sustainability. One aspect deals with energy consumption. Computers are responsible for the consumption of massive amounts of energy. Thus one of the frontiers for "Green" computing will be improving the efficiency of energy usage without compromising the computing power and end-user experience. However, there are also many other issues to be considered with computing and sustainability such as the massive amount of e-waste that is accumulating is some regions of the planet. One factor that is responsible for this accumulation is the relatively short life-cycles of electronics and computers. Another challenge that "green" computing will have to confront is the entire lifecycle of the products from creation to being recycled, while looking for ways to use resources more efficiently to reduce waste. This paper will focus on some of the key concerns of "green" computing that will face all future generations of computers.

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Limits to Growth

For most of human history, we have conflated consumption with a better quality of life. For example, purchasing a washing machine was an effective solution to freeing up some of the manual labor chores found in most households. Many women in the household suddenly found that they had more time on their hands. The automobile gave us a new level of mobility to travel around freely. Many of the previous technological breakthroughs have made massive improvements to the average person's quality of life. As a result of this trend, many people view consumption and well-being as something of the same phenomenon.

However, as Tim Jackson points out in his book, Prosperity without Growth, consumption (or GDP) longer a suitable metric for prosperity (Jackson, 2009). We have reached a point in which additional consumption actually does not add the same kind of value to our lives that it did in previous generations -- in fact, in some cases, additional consumption can actually be counterproductive to well-being. As a result of this trend, researchers such as Dunne (2005) have argued that the aesthetics roles of electronic products for example have a significant potential to go beyond traditional concepts of value and enrich our lives in new ways (Dunne, 2005). The next generations of green computing hardware and software products will incorporate more design relative to the overall value of the experience that a user with a product.

E-Waste

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