There are many facets to be unpacked here. What's a long time? If my guitar has good sustain, it means that I can play a note and hold it for maybe ten seconds. When looking at the sustainability of fossil fuel combustion, the time horizon is more in the zone of a century.
What is going to put a stop to the activity? The vibrating string on my guitar just diminishes gradually and then goes silent. Looking at the nuclear weapons strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, the main concern about its sustainability is the possibility of global nuclear annihilation. Looking at the whaling industry, the main concern is the extinction of whales of whatever species.
There are two aspects to the cessation of the activity. We might rely on that activity, and so we will suffer when the activity stops. If the activity stops because the activity has caused enough of a disaster that it is no longer possible to continue the activity, we may well suffer directly from that disaster.
What puts a stop to an activity might not be a consequence of the activity. I like to go hiking through the vacant lots on the hillside to the north of our house. Around here the vacant lots are getting developed quite rapidly. In a few years, I will no longer be able to hike through those lots. My hiking activity is not sustainable, but not as any consequence of the hiking itself.
What's the scope of the activity? Lots of people might be doing the same sort of thing. Or other people might be doing something similar. Fossil fuel combustion is an activity with a rich scope. I drive my car a few hours a week to shop, meet friends, etc. This activity of me driving my car, that has negligible impact on the global environment. But around the world, billions of people are similarly driving their cars a few hours a week. The total impact of everybody driving, that is considerable. And then fossil fuel combustion also includes coal and gas burning power plants, ocean freighters, jet airliners, gas powered residential furnaces, oil fueled industrial boilers, etc. When I consider the sustainability of my driving habits, it makes sense to see this activity as an instance of a larger pattern, and to think about the sustainability of the larger pattern. It's not like everyone else is going to stop driving just so I can continue!
To decide how sustainable an activity is, that involves predicting the future. My hiking is not sustainable because those vacant lots will be developed. But that is my prediction of the future! Maybe those lots won't get developed!
Long term sustainability of activities embedded in complex systems: this sort of puzzle is really unsolvable in any definitive way. It might seem clear enough that, between the depletion of fossil fuel resources and the climate consequences of CO2 emissions, our driving habits are not sustainable in the long run. But maybe fusion power will come to the rescue, with electric vehicles taking over, and we can continue our happy motoring lifestyle. Some sort of scenario analysis needs to be brought in. To know what the future will look like is impossible. But we can more practically sketch out some manageable number of scenarios, combinations of gross features of our ways of living. Looking at the sustainability of whatever activity, we can evaluate that against each scenario. The answer will be relative to the scenario.
Digital electronic computing is a vast and diverse activity in the world these days. How sustainable is it? What might put a stop to it? Probably some amount of computing will continue for a long time, if only at a small scale. But, could the dominance of computing in our society be toppled? How could that happen?
One plausible future scenario is that climate change continues as people continue to burn fossil fuels as long as possible. People stop large scale burning of fossil fuels because climate change destroys our industrial capabilities. Could we continue computing if lose the industrial capability for mining coal etc.? An aspect of computing that is not so visible is the way digital electronic microchips are made. This involves massive technological investment. We will only be able to make computers, and hence be able to compute, if our industrial and technological capabilities are maintained at quite a high level. Certainly if there is just a blip for a few years, computers are quite durable so there needn't be an interruption in our computing capability. But if chip manufacture fails for decades, the impact will be massive.
The unsustainability of computing due to the collapse of our industrial capability, this can be like the unsustainability of my hiking because the vacant lots got developed. My hiking is no causal factor in the development of the vacant lots. Similarly, the collapse of industrial capability could be a result of factors entirely different than computing, e.g. fossil fuel combustion and climate change. But it could also be that computing contributes to its own demise.
Computing could cause its own demise quite directly. We are already seeing the pollution of the web from all kinds of computationally created dangers. Spam, misinformation, fraud, viruses, fishing... the list is constantly growing. The web could get to be so dangerous that usage declines dramatically. The economics of chip manufacturing requires huge volume in order to amortize the huge investment in design and process development. If the demand for hardware declines, the unit cost will rise, further reducing the volume. This can become a vicious cycle that could have massive impact.
A less direct causal path, whereby computing contributes to its own demise, is where computing weakens society, and the weakened society can no longer adequately support the computational infrastructure. A very simple example would be how people lose the ability to do mathematics without digital electronic support, and thus lose the capability to debug software. A more complex example would be where the political polarization driven by misinformation in social media etc. leads to the destruction of universities so there are no more engineers to maintain chip manufacturing facilities. A yet more complex example would be where that political polarization prevents effective response to climate change, which leads to the collapse of our industrial capabilities, including chip manufacturing.
Whether any of these rather wild scenarios could come to pass... Yogi Berra had it right: nothing is harder to predict than the future!
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