P H O T O B Y G E N C H O P E T K O V

as highly relevant to global futures, not just as problems that will be solved through economic growth.

Computing Within
Limits Workshops

LIMITS ideas have been developed through three workshops (2015–2017) convened by the LIMITS community (the latter two in cooperation with ACM). The first two were held at the University of California, Irvine, and the third at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, with funding from the two universities as well as from Facebook and Google. Participants came from institutions in Abu Dhabi, Canada, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S., consistent with the global nature of LIMITS concerns and research. The 2018 workshop was held in Toronto, co-located with the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Sustainability (ICT4S). Sparked by discussions at the workshops, LIMITS participants have co-authored several papers published in mainstream conferences and a research grant. The LIMITS workshop papers are available at comput-ingwithinlimits.org

Three Key Principles

We propose three principles that can help frame computing research and practice in a way that is consistent with the ideas described in this paper and the literature we have surveyed.

Question growth. The industrialized world’s current economic system, capitalism, is predicated on growth. Economic growth has brought more than an order of magnitude rise in per capita income from $3 a day in 1800 to $100 in the early 2000s for most of Europe and North America. 16 However, despite such unprecedented prosperity, global income inequality is increasing. Wealth is accumulating in the hands of fewer and fewer astoundingly rich persons. 22 Poverty is widespread. Such social dysfunction, along with the burdens on ecosystems produced by economic activity, 28, 32, 38 suggest we must rethink the growth paradigm. The ubiquity and power of computing make it well positioned to act as an agent of change to influence proposals for transformative economic systems

ICTD: Information and
Communication Technology
for Development

ICTD is a relatively young field that has explored the potential of computing for improving the socioeconomic situation of the poor. While computing within LIMITS typically focuses on the future, Tomlinson et al. 35 note that our imagined “future” LIMITS scenarios may already exist today in the conditions in which poor communities live around the world. However, few studies within the ICTD literature consider global ecological, material, and energy limits. Most research is situated in resource-constrained contexts and assumes the constraints will be relaxed in the future after sufficient economic growth has occurred. 12, 15 The only paper so far that explicitly makes the link between LIMITS and ICTD in an ICTD venue is Tomlinson et al.’s DEV paper, “Toward alternative decentralized infrastructures.” 36 The vacuum regarding the implications of phenomena such as climate change in the ICTD literature could be filled by a LIMITS perspective.

There is, however, a tension be-
tween economic development in poor
countries—the focus of ICTD—and
sustainability. As Herman Daly points
out, the total resource footprint of the
Global North and the Global South
combined together must stay within
the boundaries of a global steady state
economy that is sustainable in the long
run. To ameliorate the problem of un-
equal distribution of wealth and the
consequent problem of poverty in the
Global South, the Global North must
shrink its resource footprint enough
that countries in the Global South are
afforded some space for necessary eco-
nomic growth. However, everyone—
North and South—must operate within
some absolute global limits. The ethi-
cal argument for improving the quality
of life of the poor is easy to make, but
reducing the Global North’s consump-
tive (and exploitative) practices to af-
ford the Global South opportunities to
grow, especially in the face of mount-
ing resource and climate pressures,
remains an enormous challenge, and
one computing should be cognizant of.

Despite differing perspectives, LIMITS and ICTD have much in common and potential for integration and collaboration. 4 For example, LIMITS work has studied the use of digital technology to design habitations in refugee camps, 29 problems of networking in rural populations in Zambia and Guatemala30 and infrastructure in conditions of scarcity in Haiti. 21 While these are classic ICTD topics, the authors in each case considered ecological, material, and energy limits in their analyses, unlike typical IC TD studies. The papers engage models of scarcity, examining the cases as possible future global LIMITS scenarios. Drought, flooding, environmental disasters, infrastructure disruption, mass migration, and permanent settlement in refugee camps in low-resource environments are seen