Devil’s Advocate: Profligacy and destruction and IT

We frequently think of technology as saving the world, as a solution to older, dirtier business practices. But are we, asks Martin Brampton, being a more than little naïve?

It may be that the human race is heading for disaster. We seem powerless to halt our own environmental destructiveness. The optimists think that IT can stand aloof from all this.

Awareness of the environment is widespread. It is not that nothing at all is being done. We are all affected by local council recycling initiatives and government propaganda to use high efficiency lamps. But the best we are achieving is to limit increases in the rate at which damage is done.

In IT, we tend to think of ourselves as engaged in a clean and harmless activity. Moreover, we can easily imagine that we are making the world more efficient and thereby contributing to reducing problems of consumption. Unfortunately, this optimistic view hides problems that will have to be confronted some time soon.

Optimising transport networks is a subject about which a great deal is known. It is a problem that is highly amenable to computer solution. But many kinds of environmental damage appear to be cost free and are thus excluded from the optimisation. We finish up, for example, with a complex food distribution network, operated by the major supermarkets, that results is most of our purchases travelling hundreds of miles before they reach our tables.

Or, taking a more direct example, modern IT provides the means for us to work almost anywhere we choose. It is suggested that this offers the potential to reduce travel and spend more time at home. Yet the outcome is frequently only to free up one kind of travel time in order to make room for another. One of the most often cited benefits of mobile communications is the ability to use a laptop computer in airports.

Even more directly, the equipment we use has a considerable environmental cost. Large volumes of clean water are used in the production of circuit boards, and much hardware finishes up in landfill sites only a few years after it comes off the production line. While the complexity and power of a modern computer is awe-inspiring, it is also a huge barrier to effective recycling.

Indeed, the astonishing pace of development is a double edged weapon. While we can be amazed that so much more processing power or memory can be fitted into a tiny physical package, we also know that we will soon have no use for it as it is overtaken by new developments. And as processors regularly double in power, we do not buy fewer of them.

Then there is the question of what we do with all the extra capability of new hardware. Often, the answer seems to be not very much, both at the micro and the macro level. We still have to replace the software that supports the simplest of tasks at regular intervals, even though the average user is hard pressed to see the differences.

On the large scale, we struggle to decide what counts as a successful organisation. The objectives of large companies often seem to be oblique to those of their customers. An illustration of this is the Post Office, which has met the targets it set for itself to become more 'commercial'. At the same time, it has failed on every measure of customer service.

Institutions, such as schools, that remain firmly in the public sector devote increasing resources to compiling statistics that can be put into 'league tables'. But everyone has examples of how this kind of evaluation simply leads to changes that defy common sense, while improving the key statistics.

The conclusion is inescapable. Technology alone cannot save us from the problems, probably extremely serious ones, towards which we are firmly headed. The received wisdom that IT must be integrated with the goals and values of the organisation precludes any kind of technological innovation that would bring about a changed direction.

To finish on a more positive note, the contribution that IT can make to these issues is the talents of its best practitioners. The very best work in IT involves critical analysis and creativity. Those are just the attributes that are most needed if we are to find a future that does not involve environmental degradation and conflict over scarce resources.