Engineers who are citizens

After a 2-month hiatus, yesterday's talk by David Douglas inspired me to write again. The talk was entitled "Citizen Engineers, Computing and Clouds". So I went expecting a talk on regular folk who do engineering, perhaps the open source community, perhaps rapid prototyping in your home, perhaps harnessing the ideas and contributions of hobbyists for a greater good. The abstract mentioned engineering and computing's relationship to current social and world problems, specifically environmental impact, so I went hoping for a hint of an idea as to how computing, computer science, could help or hurt sustainability and the fight against climate change.

It was an interesting talk, but Douglas's "citizen engineers" are not regular folk doing engineering in their free time (as one might have guessed by extension from "citizen journalists"). Instead, I heard some interesting stuff about the carbon footprint of data centers (on a par with air travel), the lack of openness about power consumption and carbon footprint by Google, and how companies should incorporate environmental impact reduction into their business practices lest they go out of business.

Which is all very well, but here is what I would like to know. Are there advances in computer science that can be immediately applied to sustainability problems, and how? Is cloud computing better for the environment than older forms of computing, and how? Some obvious things were mentioned: data center computing doesn't require nearly as much plastic components as end-user computing, because who cares what the machines look like inside a data center? But here is what I would have liked to hear and didn't: here's a sustainability problem -- you can cast it in this very cool new way which immediately suggests a computational solution.

Maybe the deeper wisdom of tackling world problems with computing is that you can't address any abstract, computational aspect of any of them without thinking at the same time about very physical and mundane things like amount of plastic and power required. I'm thinking of this as the analog to the embodied intelligence idea: the physical imprint, the body that carries out the computation will be part of the problem and part of the solution. Maybe that was the message of the talk, that I'm finally getting.