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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Analysing ICT in prospective scenarios to help reveal undone computer science

Résumé

Computer science is often mentioned as a solution to solve climate change (e.g. [Rolnick et al., 2019]). But at the same time, it is now acknowledged that ICT has it own environmental impacts. Several authors have tried to estimate future information and communication technologies (ICT) energy consumption and carbon footprint [Andrae, 2019, Malmodin and Lundén, 2018]. The projections depend on two main variables: efficiency of IT and demand for ICT (via possible rebound effects) [Freitag et al., 2021]. From these opposite observations, it seems legitimate to question which research topics computer scientists should tackle and maybe not tackle from a sustainability perspective. Defining research questions that have not yet been addressed or collectively deciding which research need to be pursued or reconsidered requires to envision desired futures of the ICT sector. To that end, we have started studying the connection between digital technologies in prospective scenarios, current research trends and undone computer science. The first objective is to observe the place of digital technologies in future narratives and analyze how ICT in prospective studies relates to today's development of digital technologies. The second objective aims at identifying if existing scenarios for ICT give space to known unknowns, and consider sunset or sunrise of technologies [Hess, 2015]. To understand the link between possible futures and current research on ICT, we have therefore analyzed the place of ICT in several prospective studies. In the climate change context, many prospective studies have been proposed in the past years to develop imagination and drive ecological transition. They describe the future in very different formats: some are purely narratives, while others rely on quantitative models. Scenarios result from different societal or technical hypotheses, each scenario being shaped by many variables: economic growth, well-being, sobriety, low-carbon energy, population, uncertain events. We reviewed 14 prospective studies [
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Dates et versions

hal-04486589 , version 1 (02-03-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04486589 , version 1

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Aurélie Bugeau, Anne-Laure Ligozat. Analysing ICT in prospective scenarios to help reveal undone computer science. Undone Computer Science conference, Feb 2024, Nantes (France), France. ⟨hal-04486589⟩
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