LOCO 2026 Lightning Talk Abstracts: 2nd International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing

URL SCAN: LOCO 2026 Lightning Talk Abstracts: 2nd International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing
FIRST LINE: Computer Science > Computers and Society

The Dissection

This volume frames computing’s environmental damage as a tractable research and management problem: measure emissions, schedule workloads, extend hardware life, reduce waste, and debate sufficiency. It is a useful diagnostic inventory, but it operates mainly inside the existing compute regime. It does not confront who owns automated productive capacity, who controls energy and infrastructure, or what happens when cognitive labor ceases to be economically necessary.

The Core Fallacy

The central error is a missing variable disguised as technical sophistication. Carbon efficiency, frugal computing, and hardware longevity can reduce the cost per computation, but they do not stop computation from expanding. Efficiency can strengthen the same automation system that destroys mass productive participation. The abstract treats ecological intensity as the primary failure mode; under the Discontinuity Thesis, the deeper rupture is the severing of labor from income and consumption.

Carbon-aware scheduling moves workloads. It does not redistribute ownership. Hardware longevity delays replacement. It does not preserve human bargaining power. Post-growth critique identifies the disease but, as presented here, supplies no mechanism for controlling the AI capital that produces it.

Hidden Assumptions

• Technical measurement will translate into aggregate environmental reductions despite scale expansion and rebound.
• Institutions can coordinate meaningful restraint while competition rewards more computation and faster automation.
• Sustainability can remain a priority independent of ownership and power.
• Extending hardware life and improving interoperability can preserve a broad human role in production.
• Discussion, tools, and early-stage results can influence deployment faster than capital incentives override them.

These assumptions leave P1 largely untouched, P2 unresolved, and P3 unaddressed.

Social Function

Primarily partial truth, transition management, and prestige signaling—with a risk of ideological anesthesia. The workshop gives institutions a respectable vocabulary for governing compute’s externalities without requiring a confrontation with concentrated control of AI capital. Its work may become valuable carcass management: measuring emissions, rationing scarce capacity, maintaining hardware, and optimizing infrastructure after the old economic circuit has begun to fail.

The Verdict

This is not a survival architecture for post-WWII capitalism. It is a maintenance manual for making an accelerating automation regime less environmentally destructive. That matters physically, but it does not reverse system death. The strongest niches identified here belong to Servitors and infrastructure Sovereigns—energy, logistics, maintenance, verification, and carbon accounting—not to the displaced majority. The collection may reduce the smoke around the collapse; it does not stop the collapse.