‘Tilting’ the Playing Field—Technology as Pinball
I started to write an op/ed for a recent issue of ChipDesigner eNewsletter on “Green Technology.” But the more I worked on it, the more depressed I became. You can write many upbeat things about going green in handhelds and data centers, but all you’re really describing are the seasonings used to make our burgeoning banquet of sugars and fats taste a little healthier.
When you contrast “Green” with “Profitable,” there isn’t any contest. Any serious business that puts far future survival against next quarter’s profits may be briefly applauded by well-wishers, but they’ll also be broken up for short term value by stockholder “advocates.” Other than conserving a watt here and there, “Green” seems to define an impractical ecosphere for raising hopes, hippies, politicians, book authors, and media writers.
Attempts to actually level the playing field by artificially putting a price/return on “green” goals, such as carbon emission markets, are full employment plans for lawyers and loophole writers. Kind thoughts are unsustainable in prolonged economic crisis.
We can’t give up, but how can we play the cards we are dealt? What IS stronger than greed?
How about SHORT TERM THRILLS? Take the model from Sports. The National Green League? The NGL tilts with the World Conservation Council for all the biodegradable marbles! It can’t be any less exciting than golf, and everyone can root for their speckled green favorites.
When you can’t afford to change the world sensibly, you sponsor contests with meaningless rewards and braggers’ rights. Transcontinental car treks developed the automobile in practical and far reaching ways, opening up the highway routes for oil-burning commerce to come, strip malls, and the world’s biggest ball of dental floss. (Well, not all the results were that beneficial.)
A million bucks here, a million bucks there, and you’re never talking about real money. But billions will be cheerfully spent pursuing watt-saving thrills. It’s a lot like my grad school days when I’d put aside a buck a week for a Giant Imperial Quart of Narragansett Beer with a quarter left over for pinball. Whacking the steel ball against the barriers, knocking down conservation targets, trying to win the Big Prize—to play the next game for free and do it all again. Tiny incremental gains will add up, and the chance to unleash the real geniuses, the athletes of innovation, who will grab the whole world and TILT to a mind-scrambling result!
Look at technology over the last few hundred years. Ignore the carbon emissions, the dead species, and heavy metals in the dwindling fish, the background heat and radiation, and imagine the laws of adrenalin harnessed for Conservation, the brain-building steroids yet to be ingested. The Laws of Physics, my watt-burning friend, were made to be broken. We (meaning My Team) can do it.