Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
The late physicist David MacKay cut through sustainable energy rhetoric with a simple approach: convert energy supply and demand to the same units, do the arithmetic, and let the numbers speak for themselves. This talk invites us to think what a similar approach could look like applied to digital technology (and to the EDT project). How much computation do we actually need, and for whom, for what? What does it cost - in energy, materials, and human effort - to design, maintain, and decommission a software system responsibly, as social, environmental, and geopolitical conditions shift around it faster than what we build? Beneath the numbers and the questions lies a harder problem: "sustainability" and "ethics" can be words worn thin by overuse, caught between hype and dismissal. Rather than settled answers, this talk sets out the questions we should be asking from day one of a project or a programme, with some first, practical pointers toward answering them.
Period
08 Jul 2026
Event title
Engineering Digital Twins: First Scientific Workshop