Cloud Native Attitude

Environment Variables host Anne Currie welcomes Jamie Dobson, co-founder of Container Solutions and author of the upcoming book Visionaries, Rebels and Machines. Together, they explore the history and future of cloud computing through the lens of sustainability, efficiency, and resilience. Drawing on insights from their past work, including The Cloud Native Attitude and Building Green Software, they discuss how cloud-native principles can support the transition to renewable energy, the potential and pitfalls of AI, and why behavioral change, regulation, and smart incentives are key to a greener digital future.

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:


Jamie Dobson: We're loaded up all these data centers, we're increasing data sets, but ultimately no matter how much compute and data you throw at an artificial neural network, I think it would never fully replace what a human does. 

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host, Chris Adams. 

Anne Currie: Hello and welcome to Environment Variables Podcast, where we give you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. So this week I am your guest host Anne Currie. And you don't have the dulcet tones of Chris Adams, you're left with me this week. So we're gonna do something a little bit different this week.

I have got an old friend and colleague and co-author, Jamie Dobson in to talk about it. So Jamie is the co-founder and CEO of a company called Container Solutions. And he's the author of the soon to be released book; Visionaries, Rebels and Machines, which I've read, and that's what we'll be talking a lot about.

And he's also the, one of my co-authors of a book I wrote nearly 10 years ago called the Cloud Native Attitude, which is about the principles of moving into the cloud. And there's an awful lot in there about sustainability with that, there's a lot we need to talk about around that. And it was actually for me, the precursor to the book that I wrote which came out with O'Reilly last year, with co-authors Sarah Hsu and Sara Bergman, Building Green Software, which as I always say every week,

everybody listening to this podcast should read because you'll find it very interesting and it is couldn't be more germane. So today we're gonna talk about those three books, really, and the thematic links between them all, which are really about resource efficiency, building at scale without it costing a ridiculous amount of money or using a ridiculous amount of resources.

And also resilience, which is something we're gonna really have to focus on when it comes to running on renewable power. So, let me let Jamie introduce himself and maybe tell us a little bit about his new book, Visionaries, Rebels, I can never remember whether it's Rebels, visionaries and Machines.

It's Visionaries, Rebels and Machines. Go for it, Jamie.

Jamie Dobson: Visionaries, Rebels and Machines. That's correct. Hello Anne. Thanks for having me on the podcast. And hello to all your listeners. who tune in every week? Yeah. So my name is Jamie. I am indeed the co-founder of a company called Container Solutions. But it's no longer, I'm no longer, I should say, the chief exec,

'cause I handed that role over about a year ago, which is probably why, or, you know, it explains why I could find the time to finish writing this damn book. So Container Solutions is a company that specializes in cloud transformation, helping customers, you know, get off whatever infrastructure they're running on now and get onto, you know, efficient cloud infrastructure.

And if we do that right, then it's kind of green and sustainable infrastructure, but it's hard to get right, which I'm sure we're gonna discuss today. 

Anne Currie: Indeed. Yes. Yes. So, so you've got a book that's about to come out, which I have read, but it's not yet available in, the, in the stores, but it will be available on, in all good book bookstores, Visionaries, Rebels and Machines. And I, the reason why I asked you to come on is because I think there are a lot of ideas in there that would, that we need to be talking about and thinking about.

So, so tell us a little bit about Visionaries, Rebels and Machines, and then I'll tell you why I think it's interesting.

Jamie Dobson: Absolutely. Yeah. So, so Visionaries, Rebels and Machines, we have to start at a point in time. And that point in time is about four or five years ago. And I was asked the question, "what's the cloud?" It was, the person asking me, it was a junior colleague, new to Container Solutions. And, you know, I started to answer, or at least I opened my mouth,

and of course I can answer that question, but I can't answer it necessarily succinctly. So I was asked the question, I think probably around about June, so maybe about five years ago today actually. And over the summer period I was thinking, "God, how do you answer that question? What is the cloud?" And so I started to creep backwards in time.

Well, the cloud is, you know, there's a bunch of computers in a warehouse somewhere. But what's a computer? And then once I asked that question. Well, computers are things made up of transistor. Well, what's a transistor? And what I came to the conclusion over the summer, was the following:

The cloud can only really be understood in its own historical context. And so interestingly, once we got to the point of, you know, answering the question, what is the cloud? The arrow was already flying. You know, there was a, an arrow was shot round about the late Victorian time at Thomas Edison's Menlo Park facility in New Jersey, and that arrow flew all the way through the last century through the web, through cloud computing, and it continues to fly with the rise of artificial intelligence. And so the last part of the book is, okay, now we know what the cloud is and what it does, where might it take us next in regards to artificial neural networks and all of that stuff? So that was the book. The Visionaries and the Rebels of the people who built teams, built teams that were innovative. All of them had psychological safety even though the, that concept wasn't known at the time. And so, these historical figures are not just ancient history, like not just Thomas Edison, but also the Jeff Bezos's of the world, the Reed Hastings's, and the modern figures of cloud computing. The visionaries and the rebels can teach the rest of us what to do with our machines, including how to make 'em sustainable. 

Anne Currie: And that is the interesting thing there. So I enjoyed the book. It's, it is quite, it is a readable romp. And I very much connect with your, with your initial motivation of trying to explain something that sounds simple, but actually you realize, oh gosh, I'm gonna have to write an entire book to even get my own head around this rather than, you know, 'cause that was true for, well, when we wrote, it's actually a, Cloud Native Attitude, which was the book that we wrote together started off 10 years ago, was pretty much for the same, it was kicked off in the same way. We were, we were saying, well, what is cloud native? What, what are people doing it for, and why are they doing it this way? And quite often, and Building Green Software,

the O'Reilly book, which is really germane to this, to this podcast, was again, the same thing. It's what is, what does the future look like for systems to be sustainable? How do we align, and make, what is the future gonna look like? And, where, and that's always seated in the past. What has been successful?

How did we get here? 

Jamie Dobson: Absolutely. So you can't move into the future unless you understand your past. And I think the similarities between the Cloud Native Attitude and Visionaries and Rebels is the tone. So my book deals with horrible things, child poverty, exploitation of people, and the truth is that a reader will put up with that for maybe one paragraph.

So if you want to, if you want to teach computing and how it can enslave the human race or not, or how it can liberate them and touch all of these really difficult themes, you've got to do it in a pretty lighthearted manner. And the reason people are saying, "oh, it's a page turner. it's entertaining, it's a bit of a rump,"

it's because we focus on the characters and all the things that happens to them. And I think that started with a cloud-native attitude because unless you can speak quite lightheartedly, you so quickly get bogged down in concepts that even for people like us who work in computing and are passionate about computing, it's just extremely boring. And there are some fantastic books out there right now about artificial intelligence, but they're so dry that the message fails to land. And I think I was trying to avoid that. 

Anne Currie: And you know for, 'cause we wrote Cloud Native Attitude together. But it is, if these, books are ideally a form of leadership. When you write a book, you are either, you are kind of saying, look, this is what I want to happen in the future.

You're trying to lead people and explain and reason and inspire. But you have to inspire. If it's boring, you're not gonna lead anyone. No one wants to follow you to the boring location they want to follow you to the exciting location.

Jamie Dobson: No. Exactly. And I think the problem is computer people, most of us have been to university, so we're on the academic path. And what happens is you forget to tell stories. So everything becomes about what the research says, "research indicates." So it's all exposition and no narrative. And the problem that is people switch off very quickly, and the paradox is that you don't make your point because you've bored your reader to death.

Anne Currie: Yeah. And this is something that's, that comes up for me over and over again in the green software movement that we quite often, we tell the story of it's being, everything being very sad. And everybody goes, "well, I don't wanna be there in that sad world." And, but it's not a sad story. I mean, it is like climate change is a really sad story.

It's terrible. It's something we need to avoid. We're running away from something, but we're also running towards something. Because there's something amazing here, which is renewables are so cheap. If we can build systems that run on solar and wind, and a little bit of storage, but not, but much less storage than we currently expect,

then we have a world in which there's really loads more power. We can do so much more than we do now, and it's just a matter of choosing what we do with it. It is a, we are not just running away from something. We're running towards something, which is amazing. And, so yeah, we tried to keep that tone.

And Building Green Software is designed to be funny. You are. It's the only O'Reilly book. One of, one of my reviewers says it's the only O'Reilly book where you actually get, you laugh out loud whilst reading it. You could read it on the beach.

Jamie Dobson: This is exactly why we created a conference at Container Solutions called WTF. What The F is Cloud Native? And it's basically because if you cannot entertain, you'll never get your message across. I've got a question for you, Anne, this wonderful future that we're heading towards, I see it as well. But 

in the research for visionaries and rebels, there was a big chapter I had on Henry Ford, and in the end it didn't, quite make it into the book, but basically, once Edison had created electricity, then all of a sudden you had elevators for the first time. So the New York landscape did not become a thing till we had electricity because there was a limit on how big the buildings could be. And that exact moment Henry Ford came in with the motorcar, and he was so successful in getting it off the production line cheaply, the beautiful boulevards of New York, of American cities, New York, St Louis, and places like that ended because basically people said, "well, we don't need to be in the city.

We can drive to the suburbs." And a lot of historians were saying if Henry Ford had just gone a bit slower, we would've adapted to the motor car quicker and therefore the cities of today would look very different. And one of my concerns with green software is,

the speed of which we're moving with data centers and AI is so quick.

I wonder if we're having another motor car moment. the future's within grasp, but if we go too quick, might we screw it up on the way?

Anne Currie: So I think what you are circling around here is the idea of, it is something that comes up quite often, which is Jevons Paradox, which is the idea that, as you get better at using something, you use more of it, it becomes cheaper, because actually because there's untapped demand.

So where there's, where people are going, "gee, you know, I really want to live in a high rise city because then naturally everybody can live together and it will be vastly better for us and we'll prefer it. And therefore we take more elevators and we go up because we've got elevators."

And people really want cars. I mean, it's one of the things, I don't drive. but everybody loves to drive. There's no point in, tying green with like nobody driving because they love to drive. And there was untapped demand for it, and therefore it was met. And remember at the time there was really, but back then we didn't consider there to be any problem with using more petrol. We didn't consider there to be any problem with using fossil fuels. And everybody went, "yeah, hooray! Let's use more and more of it."

But it did massively improve our quality of life. So I think all green messages we have to say, well, we want the improvement in quality of life, but we also want a planet and we have to optimize both of those in parallel.

We can't say that you're trading off. And this, I know that people have a tendency to look down on efficiency improvements, but efficiency improvements are what has driven humanity up until now. And efficiency improvements are so much more powerful than we think. We just don't understand how much more efficient things can get.

Jamie Dobson: Yeah. 

Anne Currie: And therefore we go, oh, well, you know, we, if people have 10 times as many cars or whatever, probably not 10 times as many. Well, compared to back to Henry Ford's days, we've got a lot more cars. We've got a lot more mobility. There is a almost seemingly limitless, demand for cars. But there are plenty of other areas of life where efficiency has outstripped the demand.

So in terms of electricity use, household electricity use in the west in the past 20, 30 years, household electricity use, despite the fact that everybody has automated their houses we've got, everybody's got washing machines and dishwashers and tumble dryers and TVs, and electricity use has still gone down.

And the reason why it's gone down is because all of those devices appeared, but then became more and more efficient. And efficiency improvements really are extraordinarily powerful. Much more than people realize. And if we force people to put the work in, and it's not free, it requires an enormous amount of work, but if people are motivated and incentivized to make those efficiency improvements, we can do an awful lot.

We can get.

Jamie Dobson: My suspicion is the world will change. So not many people realize that the car was actually very good for the environment. All around London, my children ask me, what's that thing outside the house?" It's a scraper for your feet, for your boots. And that's because all the streets of London were caked two inch shit deep of horse manure.

And at the end of every single street, the way it was piled high. So the public health issues with horses was an absolute nightmare. Not to mention the fact that people used to get kicked in the head or pulled into ditches. Fatalities from horses was, you know, a weekly account in New York City. But so it changed. So once we got the electricity, we got the lifts, the horses went away.

 My suspicion is right now we cannot run a sustainable culture or city without radically changing things.

 So, for example, did you ever stop to wonder why is your power pack warm? You know, when you charge your phone or your laptop, why does it get warm? Do you know what the answer to that question is?

Anne Currie: No, I don't actually. That's a very good question.

Jamie Dobson: There you go. So who won? Who won the battle? Tesla or Edison. So.

Anne Currie: Tesla. 

Jamie Dobson: Tesla did win. So it's basically AC versus DC. What's the best system to have? Well, DC, direct current kills you if you touch it direct current by accident and the voltage is right, you die. But what you feel on the back of your charger is heat, which is a side effect of converting AC back to DC because computer devices don't work on AC because it, the current has to go round and round, like water, in a fountain because that's the only way transistorized things work. So now people are saying, well, actually, arguably we should have a DC grid because globally we are wasting so much electricity because of this excess heat that is produced when we go from AC back to DC. So, and I get the feeling, and do you remember when we were kids, if you put your washing on at three in the morning, you got cheaper electricity.

I cannot help but think it's not just about renewable energy, but it's also the way we consume energy to make that more effective.

Anne Currie: Yeah.

Jamie Dobson: And I think if that doesn't change, I basically think, when Edison arrived, society as we knew it absolutely changed. We had no refrigerators and that changed our behaviors.

Now, some people would say, well, you became a slave to the machine. I think that's a little bit too far, but we certainly went into some sort of analog digital relationship with the machines we work, all of which drive efficiencies. I think the next chapter for sustainable energy and computing will be a change in our habits, but I can't, I don't know exactly what they're gonna be.

Anne Currie: Oh, that's definitely a thing. It's something I've talked about on the podcast before. It's the mind shift from fossil fuels, which are kind of always on, you know, easy to dispatch, so easy to turn on, easy to turn off to something, to solar and wind, which is really expensive to store,

really cheap if you use it as it is generated. But grids were designed, in many ways this is the same kind of things that you talk about in your book. Grids were originally designed specifically to provide power that was easily dispatchable, you know, that it was fossil fuels.

And that means that the whole of the philosophy of the grid is about something called supply side response. And that is all that is basically saying, "do you know, users, you don't need to worry." Flick of a switch, the electricity will always be there and it's the responsibility of the dev, of the providers of the electricity, of the grids to make sure that the electricity is always there to meet your demand.

You never have to think about it. But for renewables it's generally agreed that what we're gonna have to do is move to something called demand side response, where users are incentivized to change their use to match when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. As you say, when we were kids in the UK, we used to have something called economy seven.

You had seven hours a day, which was usually at night. where, because it was all, because back in then, I'm guessing, 'cause it was a coal fired power station. Coal fired power stations were not so easy to turn off and on again, which gas is. So we don't have it anymore. And it's, and, but in those days you say the coal fired power station was running during the night and nobody was using the power.

So we wanted to actually get people to try and use the power during the night. And we used effectively what are now called time of use tariffs to incentivize people to use spare power, which was during the night in the UK. 

Jamie Dobson: It sounds like a huge dislocation to life, but when I first came to London, the London Mayor or the authorities made an announcement that when something like this, "oh, air pollution's really bad today. Don't go out running, close your windows. Old people don't go out, don't do any exercise."

And I remember thinking "this can't be real. Is this some sort of prank?" But this is a thing in London. And I remember thinking, but at no point would the Mayor of London say, "okay, the air pollution's bad. You're not allowed to drive your car today," right? And it showed where the priorities lie. But it wasn't that difficult.

So everybody just shrugs their shoulders and says, "oh, well, okay, I just won't do any out outdoor activities today." So I think that demand side response is possible. I do wonder what happens though if, let's say, obviously the sun's shining, so that's the time you should run your data centers. What happens when the sun's not shining?

Are the cloud providers gonna be happy to have an asset sat there doing nothing when it's dark, for example, or when the wind's not blowing?

Anne Currie: Well, it's interesting. I think it depends how much, if, it's all about what is the level of difference in electricity cost between the time when the sun is shining or the wind's blowing, and the time when it isn't. I'm massively impressed by work that India is doing at the moment on this, on time of use tariffs because they have tons of, or and they know what they're looking forward, they already know they're one of the fastest growing. So India is one of the fastest growing countries in the world for rolling out solar power. Unsurprisingly, 'cause it's pretty sunny in India. So they're looking forward and they're thinking, well, hang on a minute.

You know, we are gonna have this amazing amount of solar power in the future, but we are going to have to change people's behaviors to make sure that they run on it, not the other thing. So, the way they're doing that is that the strategy that they're adopting for incentivizing people to change their behavior.

And as you say, actually people will change behavior. They just need a little bit of a push and some incentives and they will change their behavior. The incentive they're using is time of use tariffs. And India is pushing out all of the province, the states in India to introduce time of use tariffs which reflect the actual cost of electricity and push people towards times of the day when they're, when they'll be. And it's, it is a gradual process, but you can see that it will roll on and on and they're, looking at a tenfold difference that what they're saying is. That the difference should be tenfold between when your electricity is generated from the sun and when it isn't.

And a tenfold difference in price does justify a lot of behavioral change. You might as say, you might not want to turn off your, your data center during the night. But some people will go, well, hang on a minute. If it's literally, because for most data centers, the main cost is electricity. If there's a tenfold difference in electricity cost between, the day and the night, then they'll start to adapt and start to do less and start to turn things down.

Necessity is the mother of invention. If you don't, if you give a flat tariffs to everybody, they're not gonna make any changes. But if you start to actually incentivize response, demand side response, it will happen.

Jamie Dobson: Then of course then that comes back to regulation, doesn't it? Because I think of the things that Edison, well actually it was his colleague, Samuel Insull, realized if you're gonna, it makes no sense to run the grid unless it's some sort of public utility or a natural monopoly. And you can only really fairly run a natural monopoly if the price is a negotiated and set in public and all the industries regulated. So do you think the, that these tariffs, the time of use tariffs, will become part of the regulatory framework of the governments.

Anne Currie: Oh, yeah, I mean, it already is. I was saying it's, in India. It's a regulatory thing. It is part of the industrial strategy of India. There are.

Jamie Dobson: Then indirectly, then indirectly the cloud providers will be regulated because they'll be regulated through the supply of electricity.

Anne Currie: Indeed. Yeah. I mean it's interesting. there's a battle in, so some European countries, it's happening at the moment. I think, Spain already has time of use tariffs. There are other countries that have time of use tariffs and it changes behavior. And in the UK there is a battle at the moment, over, between suppliers about where the time of use tariffs are introduced.

So that battle is kind of being spearheaded by the CEO of in the UK it's Octopus Energy. Greg Jackson isn't it, I think is really saying, "look, this is what we need to do." Because, I mean, in the UK it is ridiculous that the government really doesn't want, they fear that everybody will be panicked and not be able to handle a time of use tariff.

And, but even though we used to have them not very long ago.

Jamie Dobson: It's ridiculous. People always panic about the public sentiment, but you just need to look at COVID, how flexible people can be when they understand the need for it. That's number one. And number two, when I was a kid, and that's only 40 years ago, we used to tend to lights off 'cause it was too expensive.

So we did have different behavior in the evening when we needed more electricity than in the daytime when we didn't. It's not that difficult to imagine. You know what? Do you know? What made me laugh is the average serving of meat, I think in the 1970s was 200 grams. And if you look at 200 grams, it's actually quite tiny.

It sits on your plate like a little slither of lamb. I was like, "oh my God, that's not enough. That's not enough food." But then you realize that is what we all used to eat, only 30 or 40 years ago. And so we've slowly been sort of, you know, everything's been supersized, including what we expect from the electricity companies. I think a gradual shifting back, you would, you'd barely notice it. And that's exactly how the government took salt out of our diet. That just slowly regulated how much salt could be in processed food until it had gone all together.

Anne Currie: Yeah, but I think you have to be careful about how you pitch this. Well, I think one of the issues with green is that it's pitched as, it's a reduction in meat and it's a reduction in, there's a reduction in that. I don't think it only has to be a sad story. It has to be a good story.

Something we're, a hill that we're, that we want to take because it's worth taking, not just something that we're, we are running away from that. I like the time of use tariff approach in India because it's saying, if you do this, you'll get electricity, which is a 10th the price, you know that it is something, it's a win.

It's not just like run away from the bad thing. It is run towards the good thing. And it with a minor, and you're not saying, "change your behavior because we're ordering you to do it" or because we're going to make electricity much more expensive. Although inevitably, electricity, fossil fuel, electricity will become more expensive because it is naturally more expensive these days.

Renewables have become so cheap. 

Jamie Dobson: Could cloud computing become a forcing function for cheaper electricity? Because the cloud providers need so much electricity, could this possibly accelerate the sort of the raise to green energy? 

Anne Currie: Well, it definitely can, and it has done in the past. I mean, it in, the early days, the well, so until maybe five years ago or so, the biggest non-governmental purchaser of renewable power in the world was Google. And they were buying renewable power, they were buying and, bankrolling renewable power for their data centers.

And they, so they're not the biggest, non-governmental purchaser of renewables anymore because it is now amazon to power their data centers because they got a long way behind and we all made a giant fuss about it and said, well, why aren't your data centers green? And so they put a whole load of money into renewables.

A lot of the reason why there's enormous amount of renewables these days and enormous amount of investment has gone into it, was because of the cloud vendors. Now, that is not because the cloud vendors are all secretly social justice warriors. I mean, they did it for their own benefit. But they did do it.

Jamie Dobson: That's another pattern that reoccurs is so, at the turn of the last century, so many entrepreneurs were sat on so much money that class unrest was really bubbling. So all of a sudden you got the subway in New York, subway in Paris, the municipal control of transportation, all kinds of stuff.

And then you're left thinking, "oh, was, were, they all do-gooders? Was that the reason they did that?"

Some of them may have been, but mainly they were trying to avoid class unrest. And so it's interesting that these, a good outcome can come on the back of self-interest, that is true, isn't it?

Anne Currie: Yeah, it is true. I it, and it's very hard to know what the unintended consequences, positive and negative of, all behaviors are. So, a lot of investment in early stuff becomes wasted later. So, you, like, you mentioned, subways, railways in the UK and worldwide.

Lots of early investment in railways resulted in loads of over provisioning of railways. And then as things got a bit more efficient and everybody goes, well actually you only need one train to go between London and Edinburgh and not 16 different trains on different lines. You get some kind of consolidation down and improvements in efficiency and that's how actually things become cost effective because actually overprovisioning is very cost ineffective.

Jamie Dobson: Well, that's true, but that is a very cheeky way to transfer money from rich people to poor people, because obviously what happened is, rich people invested in the railways, railways were over provisioned, those people never got a return. The rest of us were left with cheap railway infrastructure. Exactly the same happened with internet. Everyone's like, right, we gotta wrap the world up in optic fibers. Private companies came in, private investors came in, paid for all of that. Then we had way too many optic fiber cables, and now we've all got practically free internet access. So that occasionally it, it goes either way.

Anne Currie: Yeah, and I have to say, I, and I see the same thing with AI. So AI is interesting 'cause on the one hand I rail against how, and AI is unbelievably inefficient at the moment that there's an awful lot of talk about, oh, we'll have to build nuclear because we need it for AI and all that kind of stuff and we'll build all the nuclear and we'll build all the, you know, and hopefully, we'll we need to try and steer people towards doing with nuclear and doing it with solar and wind rather than, rather than fossil fuels. But at the end, it's going to be, there's so much wasted inefficient code in AI. AI is going to need a fraction of the power that we eventually build, we initially build to power the AI. I mean, because at the moment I'm talking to people who are doing measurements and differences between different AI models that do, you know, an equivalent amount of stuff.

The ones that are optimized, 10,000 times more efficient, 600,000 times more efficient. I've even heard a million times more efficient. There's so much waste in AI at the moment.

Jamie Dobson: Absolutely, and I think people don't, are not focused particularly on theoretical breakthroughs. So Jeffrey Hinton came up with the back, back propagation of errors in neural networks. I think it was about 1983. That's in the book by the way. And that was a breakthrough. That breakthrough, that theoretical breakthrough's got nothing to do with computing power or anything. It's a theoretical breakthrough. Right now we're desperate for something like that. So 

we're loaded up all these data centers, we're increasing data sets, but ultimately no matter how much compute and data you throw at an artificial neural network, I think it would never fully replace what a human does. 

So I think it's nice to know that as we lay, you know, we lay down this computing infrastructure and fingers crossed all of its powered by, you know, renewable energy, in the background, researchers will be chipping away at the next theoretical And I think they have to come with artificial intelligence because I think there will be limits to what you can do with generative AI.

And I think we're probably reaching them limits right now.

Anne Currie: Well, improving AI efficiency does not require massive theoretical breakthroughs. It just, it can be done using the same techniques that we've used for 30 years to improve the efficiency of software. It is just software. I mean, if you look at, DeepSeek, for example, DeepSeek did, have done, I think, so DeepSeek had to make their AI more efficient because the Biden administration said they can't have the fancy chips.

So they just went, "oh, we can't have the fancy chips, so we're just gonna make some software changes." And they did it like that, effectively. They're a tiny company and they increased the efficiency tenfold pretty much instantly. And they used three different methods, all of which, well, one of which is probably Max House and it's probably was probably most of the 10 x.

The others, there's still so much room for additional efficiency improvement with them. They did, they got rid of over provisioning. They moved from 32 bits of precision to eight bit precision 'cause they didn't need the 32 bit. That was a classic case of over provisioning. So they've removed the over provisioning and that's been known about for years.

That's not new. AI engineers have known that 32 bit is, over egging it. And they could run on 8 bit for years. So they didn't do anything new. They didn't have to do any new research. All they had to do was implement something that has, that was well known, but people just couldn't be assed doing. 

Jamie Dobson: Yeah, all of this noise will soon die down and people behind the scenes away from the attention grabbing headlights will continue to crack on with these things. And so my prediction is that everything's going to, everyone's gonna be pissed off in the next six to 12 months. "AI failed to deliver,"

but in the background, use cases will get pieced together.

People will find these optimizations, they'll make it cheaper. And I do reckon, ultimately, generative AI will sink into the background just in the same way that nobody really talks about the internet, right? It's the Web or it's mobile phone applications that do something sat on top of the computer network infrastructure. I think that's probably what's gonna happen.

Anne Currie: I suspect that generative AI is not going to entirely disappear just because, so I used to work, many years ago, I worked in the, in the fashion industry. I was, I worked for a company that was one of the first in pure play internet e-commerce companies. And because it was fashion, we used a lot of photography.

An awful lot of photography, and a lot of it, we had a whole team of editors. So, you know, I can see companies that work with photography, they have, a surprisingly large number of people in the world edit photographs. And so you know that there's a huge, demand for making that easier.

The downside is that you then, even now, all photo, all photographs that you see online represent people who do not exist. You know, they, it is like all models you see, it's probably not, that model kind of is kind of based on a person, but.

Jamie Dobson: lots of people, isn't it? So I think that generative AI stuff will remain, but I think it will become specific. So for example, I saw yesterday that the government are piecing together a number of different tools that's, let's call that the substrate, but on top of that, it's to give civil servants conversational interface about what was our policies,

can you summarize this for me, can you suggest a new policy, which is dangerous because anything, any decision based on past data, it's a reflection of and not necessarily a vision of what could be. So I think that's probably what's gonna happen, but I could be wrong and because the truth is none of us actually know.

It's all speculation at this point. 

Anne Currie: Yeah, so, so before we, well actually we've still got a bit of time, but before we go, I want to focus a little bit on what I see are the themes that run through the creation of the internet and the creation of modern technology in Visionaries, Rebels and Machines, and the Cloud Native Attitude, and Building Green Software.

And I think a lot of the themes there are, trying to de deliver your results, the thing that you want, the thing that's gonna improve your life, or the thing that people think is gonna improve their life on fewer resources with fewer resources, because that's the only way it scales. The cloud was all essentially all about how do we deliver our Google's, I mean, it was the cloud was, came outta Google. And it came outta Google, which was the first hyperscaler, and Google was saying, well, actually we really need to deliver our services at incredible scale, but we can't spend the, you know, there's a limit to how much money we can spend on doing it.

So we have to do it using operational efficiency and code efficiency so that we deliver this service on fewer resources and also resilience, you know, because things fail at scale and therefore we need to be resilient to failure. But that efficiency and that ability to respond to changing circumstances is exactly what we need to handle the energy transition.

Jamie Dobson: So I think the common theme that goes all the way from Thomas Edison to the teams building systems using AI now is that technologies change, but human nature doesn't. So, so the way those teams were managed has been absolutely consistent. I think one of the great contributions of Visionaries and Rebels is to show to people, you don't need to change the way you manage your techies because actually these, this is of success stories that lasted 150 years. Second theme is that once the foundations are laid, it's not the creators of a technology that dictate its destiny, but the users. So once we had a grid, boof, people started inventing applications. Exactly the same once the internet was there, people started inventing web applications. And once the cloud was there, we had Netflix, and then we had Starling Bank and all the things built on top of the substrate. So I think for sure what's gonna come next for sustainable computing will not necessarily be dictated by those building cloud infrastructure. The teams out there, the safe teams, the innovative teams taking risks. I think they will find the use cases. They will dictate what happens next.

Anne Currie: Well, so that's interesting 'cause that actually instantly reminds me of the approach that India, which we already talked about, that India are taking where you say, well look, we'll incentivize people to stick a whole load of renewable power into the local grid, into the grid. We've got the grid.

The grid just distributes the power and we introduce those incentivizing time of use tariffs, and we say, look, you know, there's really cheap energy at these times. Fill your boots. You decide what you're gonna do with it. And then just leaving the users of the grid, the users of those time of use tariffs to work out what's gonna happen.

Jamie Dobson: And I think people will look to India. I think everybody looks at other countries that are doing these experiments. So if it works out in India, then of course you could imagine that other countries might say, "oh, well, that's actually worked out over there. We can copy that as well." But ultimately they're building on existing infrastructure.

You know, they say, well, this is what we've got, what, you know, how can we, what does that interface between our users look like? And by making a change there, they will change user behavior somewhere else. 

Anne Currie: Yeah.

Jamie Dobson: It's hard to predict, though. It's hard to predict.

Anne Currie: it is hard to predict it. it's kind of, it's an interesting, something that comes up in grid discussions about this, quite often, is this whole kind of idea that, in some ways countries that are less developed than America and the UK are in a much better position for the energy transition because governments can go, we'll have time of use tariffs in every day.

We'll, it's not that far. For, you know, the people quite used to microgrids, they're quite used to things being fluctuating. They're not, they haven't got used to everything being available at the flick of a switch and a hundred percent reliable. Reliability, to a certain extent, breeds fragility. It breeds people who've forgotten how to handle change.

Jamie Dobson: Yeah. So of course there are places in the world that have got cell phone infrastructure, but they don't have any telecommunications infrastructure, because by the time they came around to installing it, cell phones were a thing, so they just completely skipped. That whole step in technology. We've still got phone boxes in the UK that we, nobody knows what to do with. They're on the street corners, growing moss, and that's a legacy, exactly like what I mentioned earlier, the mud scrapers outside of people's houses. These are a legacy of previous sort of infrastructure. Horses in the case of the scraper and then the telephone boxes in case in the case of cellphones. So I think that's true that india probably has got places that are either off grid or nowhere near as reliable as what we have, for example, in the UK. So then it makes sense that the government can be more experimental because the people are not gonna lose anything. There's nothing to lose.

There's only gains. 

Anne Currie: Indeed. Yes. And in fact, actually, I mean, it is interesting that time of use tariffs being introduced in the UK is now controversial because we have become strategic snowflakes. We can't. We can't, they fear that we can't change, although I think they're wrong. And in fact, time of use tariffs were totally fine 30 years ago.

And nobody died as a result of economy seven heating.

Jamie Dobson: There's an absolute relationship between the reliability of a system and how spoiled its users has become. So if you, when I first went to the Netherlands, the train would be two minutes late and people would literally slam their feet on the ground in anger, right? And swear in Dutch about the state of the NS. Coming from the UK it's like, "well, whatever."

Now, exactly the same happened when, when the video store came along. Most people were used to consuming media as and when, you know, they chose to. But with the video shop, they only had limited editions of new releases. The frustration that created in users of video stores is exactly what led to Netflix's creation. So the more reliable something is, the more complacent, and the higher the expectations its users have of the system. But I think COVID taught the UK government that we could be way more flexible than they fear we are. 

Anne Currie: Yeah. I agree. And, except actually I don't think they learned that lesson because they immediately forgot it again. 

Jamie Dobson: Apparently there's loads of lessons they didn't learn. 'Cause apparently we're less ready for a pandemic now than we were before COVID.

Anne Currie: Yeah. It is a, it is amazing how many lessons we didn't learn that, but, I think that takes us through a final thing that we should discuss, which I think comes out of what you've just said there about resilience, which is some, and it's something that is a modern thing that we talk about a little bit in the book, in all those three books, which is Chaos Engineering, which is the modern approach to resilience, which is that you get more, ironically, you get more resilient systems by building them on top of systems that you don't expect to be a hundred percent resilient.

The expectations of, of a hundred percent availability, supply side response builds, in the end, more fragile systems. 

Jamie Dobson: The fragility has to go somewhere. So the more resilient the system is, the more fragile the users are. And then the converse of that is true. The more a system fails, the more flexible its users become, and the more workarounds they have because they're not sure if it's gonna be ready. I do know one of the key lessons I took while whilst putting Visionaries and Rebels together could be distilled into one sentence. A system that doesn't fail during its development will fail catastrophically in production. And so what you're left with is electricity grid, the internet, the cloud computing, they're so amazingly, you know, resilient and reliable, they are literally are literally always there. You start to take, you do start to take them for granted. but the paradox is that if you want to create resilient systems, you've got to simulate, stimulate failure in order to learn how to deal with failure, therefore avoid it in the future. It's all a little bit circular really.

Anne Currie: Yeah. Yeah. So the irony is that exposing end users to the fluctuation in the availability and price of electricity for renewables, it sounds scary, but it will produce, in the end, a more resilient society. A more resilient system on a countrywide scale.

Jamie Dobson: And in your opinion, what's the relationship between this, these type of tariffs and demand side behavior and cloud computing? Where is the link there?

Anne Currie: Well, I mean, data centers are users of a grid. They are users that, they are prime users of electricity. If we make a tenfold difference, and I don't think it's gonna, it's gonna affect, it is gonna work for anything less than a tenfold difference in price, we will start to see behavioral change.

We will start to see data centers go, "do you know, is there a way that we can, we can reduce the number of machines that are running," because at that point the cost will start. So we need to get it to a point where the cost, the different time of use tariff costs make it worthwhile switching to operations to when the sun is shining the winds blowing.

But that is what we have to do, because we need the demand side response behavior. We need the change of response from users. So we have to make it worth their while.

Jamie Dobson: You're gonna use economic nudges to make data centers consume green energy, right? So that's the energy side of the equation. What do we do about water supply? So, I don't know if you realize, but lots of data have been refused planning permission

because they will drain fresh water from people's houses governments, quite, you know, are not ready to sort of take that on the chin.

So what are your thoughts on the water issue?

Anne Currie: Well, again, that's, that is a known issue. If we actually, at the moment, if they don't have to do it, they won't do it. So if it will, cooling using water is very cheap and easy. And therefore they do, that's what they do.

That is the default. But there are alternatives. I mean, if you look at more modern chips that are, I mean Intel, it's a bit of an old fashioned chip these days, it's very hot. The Nvidia chips are very hot, but there are chips that are coming out that are much more efficient, that're much cooler, that, and that are often designed to be air cooled, not water cooled.

So, if we move towards, so it is not unknown, the technology exists for chips that don't get so hot that they require water cooling. The future is chips that can be air cooled. And if they can be air cooled, they're cooled with aircon. And aircon can be fueled by solar power, because obviously, you know, it's when it's hot and it's sunny that you have the biggest problem with heating, it's when it's not sunny and warm,

it's less of an issue. So, the future here, the solution is better and more efficient chips hardware that can be air cooled. That that is for most hardware. I think that has to be, that is at least a big part of the solution.

Jamie Dobson: Does the future involve huge data centers that fall under government regulation? Because one of the reasons why the electricity grid became a natural monopoly, is 'cause it made no sense to put six sets of cables down. There wouldn't've been enough space in the street and actually the electricity providers couldn't get economies of scale and therefore could not pass on cheap electricity to its users and therefore electricity would never be become widespread.

So is there a similar argument for the cloud providers presently?

Anne Currie: I have to say I'm a huge believer that we just do it through pricing, that we want data centers to be closed. So in Scotland, and we throw away, we turn off wind, we pay wind farms to turn off. We spend billions and billions of pounds every year to paying wind farms to turn off because there is no user for that power within easy reach of that wind farm.

And we're only talking about Scotland. We're not talking about Siberia. 

Jamie Dobson: I think we could build a data center there.

Anne Currie: Why don't we build a data center there?

Jamie Dobson: They've got plenty of wind and water.

Anne Currie: And an extremely well educated workforce. And it's a bit cooler up there as well, so you don't need to do quite so much cooling anyway. So, but there's no incentive. So while there's no incentive,

people won't act. Once there is incentive and a really juicy incentive in place, you know, a 10 x difference in price, we will see behavioral change. Because we do. People, humans are very good at changing their behavior, but only if there's a good reason to do so.

Jamie Dobson: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Anne Currie: And actually that kind of brings us to the end of our hour.

And we, I think we've had a really interesting discussion. I hope the readers of the listeners and potentially in the future readers have enjoyed the discussion. All the links for everything we talked about, all the books, all the comments, will be in the show notes below, so you can go and have a look.

And you have to, yeah, actually, you know, you can pre-order Jamie's book, Visionaries, Rebels and Machines on Amazon or any good bookshop, now. You can also buy the Cloud Native Attitude or Building Green Software, which you can also read for free if you have an O'Reilly subscription. And when I get round to it, I'm eventually going to create a commons Building Green Software and I kick me.

Everybody should be kicking me all the time to do that because it's just bit work that I need to do. Anyway, so Jamie, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I've really enjoyed our chat. Is there anything final you wanna say before we disappear off?

Jamie Dobson: Nothing final for me. The book launch, there'll be a launch party in London at some point. It's available on Kindle, but for now, I'm just happy to get you know, feedback and it's been great to talk to you today, Anne, and I really hope your listeners took something away from this.

Anne Currie: So I hope people enjoyed the conversation. It was a bit, a little bit of an author's book club, so a bit different to normal. But I hope you enjoyed it and let us know if you want to hear more of this kind of discussion. Thank you very much and, until we meet again, goodbye from me. 

Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.

To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode.