The Efficiency Paradox and How to Save Yourself and the World

The presentation titled The Efficiency Paradox and How to Save Yourself and the World by Holly Cummins highlights the counterintuitive nature of efficiency and its implications on both human happiness and environmental sustainability. Here is a structured summary of the key points covered:

Introduction

The talk begins by exploring how inefficiency affects our lives and the planet, while paradoxically efficiency can sometimes lead to increased inefficiency.

Machine and Human Efficiency

• Machine efficiency often enhances human efficiency, illustrated by the Quarkus Java framework which uses waste-reduction techniques benefiting both computers and people.
• It's crucial to avoid optimizing the wrong things, as absolute utilization is unsustainable and not necessarily efficient.

Historical Context and Systems Thinking

• The concept of efficiency began with steam engines and extended into business and software.
• Systems thinking is essential to truly understand and manage efficiency, drawing on performance engineering, mathematics, economics, and psychology.

The Paradox of the Efficient Animal

• Efficiency perception can be misleading; for example, jellyfish are more efficient than kangaroos, yet less appealing as a metaphor for human productivity.
• Experiments with shorter work weeks show increased productivity and happiness, challenging traditional efficiency assumptions.

Climate and Software Efficiency

• Slow and zombie code significantly contribute to waste and climate change.
• Optimizing software, like reducing unnecessary data storage and server usage, helps mitigate environmental impacts.

Conclusion

• The presentation concludes with a call to find "double wins" where optimizations can benefit both business outcomes and sustainability efforts.
• Encouragement to challenge and reassess existing assumptions about efficiency to achieve significant improvements.

Overall, Holly Cummins' talk advocates for a balanced approach to efficiency, recognizing the need for idleness and rest in achieving long-term sustainability and productivity.

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

Inefficiency is ruining our planet and our lives. Efficiency is ruining our happiness, and weirdly, it’s also ruining our efficiency. Heeeeelppp!? What’s a techie to do? In this talk, Holly walks through a range of techniques that can be used to find and eliminate software waste and reduce climate impacts. For example, zombie servers and slow code are a big climate problem, but the vrrrooom model gives us double-win hope.

But machine efficiency isn’t much use without human efficiency. The good news is that there isn’t as much of a tradeoff as you might think between these two types of efficiency. Sorting out machine efficiency often helps humans, too. For example, the Quarkus Java framework uses many interesting waste-reduction techniques. These optimizations have the dual benefit of speeding up computers, and also speeding up people.  

So far, so good, but we need to be careful we don’t end up accidentally optimizing the wrong things, and making stuff worse. 100% utilization is not sustainable for either humans, or people. It’s not even very efficient (remember the paradox part?). It turns out, thinking about efficiency needs systems thinking. Holly will draw lessons from performance engineering, mathematics, economics, and psychology to give guidance on how to achieve more by doing less.