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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