Cloud-based CRM company Salesforce has announced the launch of its ‘Green Code,’ a new initiative which it says will help reduce carbon emissions associated with the software development lifecycle.

The Software Development Lifecycle Carbon Emissions Problem 

The Green Code has been developed to tackle the environmental impact caused by the process of developing, deploying, and maintaining software applications. For example, this impact comes from the energy consumption of the servers and other computing equipment used during these activities, as well as from the manufacturing and disposal of this equipment. Software development involves a range of activities, including designing, coding, testing, and deployment and each of these stages requires computing power and energy, which can result in significant carbon emissions e.g., running servers and data centres requires large amounts of electricity, which in turn generates greenhouse gas emissions, and disposing of e-waste can require carbon-emitting requires energy and resources as well as contributing to environmental pollution and health hazards.

The IT Sector Emissions 

As highlighted by Salesforce, the IT sector is responsible for up to 3.9 per cent of global emissions (almost as much as the airline and shipping industries) with these emissions expected to rise as organisations increasingly rely on software to drive their operations and accelerate their digital transformation.

Salesforce’s own research shows that although the IT sector is a major carbon producer,75 per cent of technologists want to develop software applications that do less harm to the environment, but nearly half simply don’t know how.

What Is The Green Code? 

The Green Code initiative is a set of new sustainability best practices to help anyone from UX designers and software developers to system architects and IT operations managers to work towards net zero. The idea is that offering practical recommendations for designing apps and writing code that have less of an impact on the environment is a powerful leverage point that remains largely untapped and could help make a significant impact toward decarbonisation.

Four Key Areas

The Green Code focuses on the four key areas of:

– Design & UX: Helping designers to reduce energy use while providing a better user experience by making sustainability a design requirement.

– Architecture: Helping software architects to choose an architectural pattern and deployment model for software development that leads to cost savings and reduces environmental impact.

– Development: Helping to develop sustainable code I.e., software code that uses less energy, leading to significant emissions reductions, particularly when deployed at scale.

– Operations: Focusing on e.g., locating capacity in the right regions and scheduling workloads during high renewable energy periods can help companies can reduce their carbon emissions.

The Importance Of Leveraging Green Code Best Practices 

Suzanne DiBianca, EVP, and Chief Impact Officer at Salesforce points out that, “By leveraging these ‘green code’ best practices, technologists and organisations can approach the challenge of sustainability in IT to drive meaningful efficiencies and cost savings across their IT enterprises while accelerating their sustainability journeys.” 

Srinivas Tallapragada, President, and Chief Engineering Officer at Salesforce said, “With Green Code, we’re hoping to inspire software teams and the entire IT sector to prioritise sustainability, just as they do performance, security, and accessibility.” 

What Does This Mean For Your Organisation? 

Salesforce makes the point that minor changes can translate into big impacts for a company’s carbon footprint and that it looks, from their research, as though most technologists want to develop software applications that do less harm to the environment, but they lack any guidance on how to do so. Producing these ‘Green Code’ best practices, therefore, is a way to help make a positive difference in what has thus far been a relatively untapped and overlooked but crucial area. For businesses and organisations in the IT sector, following these best practices could help them on the road to sustainability and if widely adopted could be one way to help the IT sector to become less of a carbon emissions producer.

Following “AI Godfather” Dr Geoffrey Hinton’s departure from Google to talk about the dangers of AI, we look at what the threats could be and what this could mean for businesses.

Departure From Google

Dr Geoffrey Hinton was dubbed as the “AI Godfather” because of his pioneering research on neural networks and deep learning which paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT. However, his resignation from Google recently was accompanied by some chilling warnings in a statement to the New York Times and subsequent media interviews where he noted that he now regretted his work. Some of the points he’s been reported as making about the dangers of AI are that:

• The dangers of AI chatbots are “quite scary”.
• AI chatbots may soon be more intelligent than humans. For example, with digital systems, all copies of them can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly, so they can know much more than any one person.
• “Bad actors” could use AI for “bad things”, e.g. giving robots the ability to create their own sub-goals.

Recent Open Letter

Dr Hinton’s resignation comes not so long after the recent “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter” signed by many high-profile figures in the tech industry including Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and even some DeepMind researchers. The letter called upon “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4″, which is the next and even more powerful incarnation of OpenAI’s LLM.

The letter made the point that, “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive, and their risks will be manageable.” It highlighted a series of questions to consider about the risks of AI, including:

• “Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?“

• “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?“

• “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us?“
• “Should we risk loss of control of our civilisation?”

Although these questions seem dramatic, the main point of the letter is that a kind of ‘time out’ is needed because of the speed at which AI is developing.

Not everyone agrees, however, that a 6-month moratorium on AI development is feasible or the right way to go and, in fact, Dr Hinton has been reported as saying that he doesn’t think that AI development should be halted.

What Are The Main Worries About The Threats Of AI?

In addition to those risks highlighted by the questions in the open letter and by Dr Hinton’s reported comments in the press, some of the main worries about the potential threats that AI could pose, include:

• Job displacement. As AI and automation become more advanced, there is concern that they will replace human workers in many industries, leading to job losses and economic instability.
• Bias and discrimination. AI systems can learn to make decisions based on biased or incomplete data, which can result in discriminatory outcomes, particularly in areas such as hiring, lending, and criminal justice.
• Privacy and security. AI systems can be used to collect and analyse vast amounts of personal data, raising concerns about how that data is used and protected.
• Autonomous weapons. There is concern that the development of autonomous weapons powered by AI could lead to the escalation of conflict and the loss of human control over military decision-making.
• Existential risks. Some researchers and thinkers have raised concerns about the long-term risks of advanced AI, including the possibility of superintelligence that could pose an existential threat to humanity.

These threats could impact individuals, organisations, and society as a whole, which is why many now think that it’s important to carefully consider the ethical and social implications of AI as it continues to develop and be deployed in various contexts.

Already Deployed

The fact is that AI is becoming ubiquitous and is increasingly deployed in many systems in various industries. For example, AI algorithms are used in video-streaming platforms, recruitment (for application filtering), by insurance companies to calculate premiums, and in medicine as part of scanning and diagnosis, to name just a handful.

Some Are More Sceptical

Many IT industry figures, however, are sceptical about the idea that AI algorithms could surpass human intelligence any time soon. For example, some of the points made include:

• Chatbots are known to draft their responses token by token to predict the next word in a response, whereas when humans speak, they express more fully formed ideas. Therefore, understanding the difference between human and machine intelligence is important when separating a likely future from hype.
• The fluency of chatbots doesn’t prove that they can reason or achieve understanding in the same way as humans.
• AI chatbots, for example, are limited to narrow tasks and can’t interact with the physical world to complete more varied assignments as humans can do as a result of their intelligence.
• We are really still at the starting point for AI and the current ‘constructivist’ approach needs to be developed further so that systems can model causality autonomously, in an effective and efficient manner in order to be more ‘intelligent.’
• It’s important not to confuse intelligence with sentience, a fact that Google engineer Blake Lemoine discovered when he was sacked for suggesting that the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) AI system bot was somehow sentient. True human intelligence is linked to sentience, which is one of the reasons why AI may not be able to surpass what we know as human levels of ‘intelligence.’

AI Market Domination

It’s worth remembering also that generative AI, for example, is a rapidly growing market where some early players have gained a lead (i.e. OpenAI with ChatGPT) and where it may be in the interests of other big tech companies to slow AI development down so they can catch up and compete. Some also think that there is already the need to review the AI market to make sure that no single firm will dominate the market and that the benefits are available for all. For example, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has said that it will be looking at the impact of AI on competition, with a view to creating “guiding principles” to protect consumers as AI develops. Also, in the US, the heads of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic have met US Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss similar issues.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The rapid growth of AI and the personal experience of many people with generative AI through ChatGPT, coupled with a lack of understanding of how AI actually works, commercial influences, and alarming hype fuelled by reports such as those about Dr Hinton’s resignation, the open letter, and other tech commentators have said, have led to a focus on the threats of AI. The fact is that just as AI could result in job losses, privacy issues and the circulation of misleading information, it will also transform the way businesses compete, drive substantial economic growth, and could deliver many more benefits than negative outcomes. Regulation, the setting of guiding principles, and a degree of collaboration between big players, governments, and other interest groups could all help to minimise the threats and many see the proposed 6-month moratorium as an unlikely solution to what is essentially progress, a new kind of industrial revolution, and a rapidly growing and changing new market that holds exciting potential opportunities for businesses as well as threats.

Google has announced the rollout of ‘Passkeys,’ which it describes as “the easiest and most secure way to sign-in to apps and websites” and a major step toward a “passwordless future.”

Working Toward A Passwordless Future : FIDO & Passkeys

Passkeys comes out of the work that Google’s been doing with the FIDO Alliance, an open industry association, formed in February 2013, to develop and promote authentication standards to “help reduce the world’s over-reliance on passwords”. ‘FIDO’ (Fast IDentity Online) sign-in credentials refer to a set of open and scalable authentication standards that aim to reduce reliance on passwords and enhance the security of online services.

Also, in May last year, Apple, Google and Microsoft announced that they were joining forces to support a common passwordless sign-in standard to allow websites and apps to offer consistent, secure, and easy sign-ins across devices and platforms. At the time, the joining of forces between the tech giants enabled users to automatically access their FIDO sign-in credentials (also known as a “passkey”) on many of their devices, even new ones, without having to re-enrol every account and employ FIDO authentication on their mobile device to sign-in to an app or website on a nearby device, regardless of the OS platform or browser.

Passkeys

Passkeys are the latest step in the passwordless sign-in journey and offer users a way to sign-in to apps and sites the same way they unlock their devices: with a fingerprint, a face scan, or a screen lock PIN. Although passwords and 2-Step Verification (2SV) will still work for Google Accounts, Google says that Passkeys are available for Google Accounts today and can be easily set up by visiting g.co/passkeys.

Advantages

There are several key advantages of passwordless sign-ins over traditional password-based authentication methods, which are:

• Increased Security. Passwordless sign-ins provide better security than traditional password-based authentication methods. Passwords can be guessed, stolen, or even obtained through phishing attacks. On the other hand, fingerprint and face scan biometrics are unique to each individual and much harder to replicate. Passkeys, unlike passwords, can’t be written down or shared, and are resistant to popular online attacks like phishing or social engineering, thereby making it much more difficult for someone to impersonate the user where Passkeys are used.
• Convenience. Passwordless sign-ins can provide a more convenient and streamlined user experience. Users don’t need to remember complex passwords, and they can quickly and easily authenticate themselves using their biometric data or a simple screen lock PIN.
• Reduced friction. Passwordless sign-ins can reduce friction in the login process, which can help to increase user engagement and retention. Traditional passwords can be time-consuming and frustrating to enter, especially on mobile devices with smaller screens.
• Improved user experience. Users don’t need to worry about forgetting their password or resetting it, which can lead to a smoother and more enjoyable user experience overall.
• Lower support costs for Google. Password-related support requests can be a significant cost for organisations, particularly if users forget their passwords or need to reset them frequently. Passwordless sign-ins can help to reduce these support costs by eliminating the need for password-related support requests.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Finding solutions to keep one step ahead of cybercriminals whilst maintaining or increasing convenience for users, avoiding the damage caused by data breaches whilst staying competitive and increasing user engagement and retention, is an ongoing challenge for big tech companies like Google. The passwordless future has been a vision for some time and the expansion of the FIDO Alliance standards and Apple, Google and Microsoft joining forces have accelerated the steps to date, and the introduction of Passkeys. As outlined above, there are many advantages to not relying on passwords, not least the increased security and convenience, although, as Google acknowledges, the change to Passkeys will take time and passwords and 2SV will still work for Google Accounts. For businesses in today’s digital world, any extra security is welcomed, and Passkeys have the potential to help with customer retention by making it easier to login to apps and websites. For Google, Microsoft, and Apple, having shared standards that they’ve developed that are widely used also simplifies things, will reduce costs going forward, and is another way to help them retain their powerful market positions.