Changes in React can cause huge changes downstream, with millions of websites being affected. One of these changes is power consumption. More efficient code in the React framework can result in drastic cuts in carbon emissions. Research, however, shows that a significant amount of websites run outdated versions of the React Framework. 6 This could be because of a myriad of issues that could arise from upgrading to a newer version. Most notably breaking changes that break backwards compatibility, in which case the developer has to go in and manually change the code.
As someone who loves up to date software and yet dreads upgrades, I found this a heartening read. Tagging on potential climate impact gives me all the more reason to work towards software upgrades.
What I find most interesting about this though is the potential of scaled impact in climate. Upgrading a single site, which runs on hundreds of millions of devices, can result in real energy savings.
One of the really interesting things about tech, that we struggle to grok because it's extremistan^1, is that impact scales exponentially rather than linearly. If you taught one other person a better farming technique in an agrarian economy, it would at best scale geometrically and it would take a long time to diffuse.
If you taught a single website how to load more efficiently, you could instantly improve the carbon footprint of millions. Those types of impacts are hard to wrap our heads around, yet they are going to become more and more common given Everything is Technology.
What's kind of wild is that as software becomes more embedded in our everyday lives, the real world impact of software changes is growing. What if Nest finds a new algorithm that's 1% more efficient for temperature control? They can scale that improvement out to 1 million homes overnight.
Of course there is great risk to this type of technological centralization, but there is great potential as well. One of the areas of AI I'm excited about is the ability to find new little optimizations. These are hard to find and it costs real resources to dig them up. When we put our minds to it, we can make it happen. Google reduced the energy required for LLM inference by 33% and AWS quietly improved almost all its services over the years, saving customers money and the earth carbon.
We need more of these scaled, detailed improvements. And AI is really good at surfacing opportunities for them and making them happen faster. Whether it's upgrading an outdated package or finding a memory leak, AI can scale human impact at the scale of technology.
This underscores my core thesis about AI: the most exciting applications lie in its ability to extend, not replace human capabilities. To be honest, I don't find myself all that excited about agents. Most small businesses are not ready for agents. To unlock real economic growth there, we need process and people change. I find it unlikely that a company using paper billing is going to jump over Zapier and move right to an AI agent (though I might be wrong here!).
The market for agents is really the market for Zapier automations and we've got a long ways to go yet there. But the ability to scale humans, scanning huge volumes of information and scanning things we should, but can't, is where the real unlock lies.
Now that's not all sunshine. Just as we can find cool things because of human extension, we can find not so cool things like security vulnerabilities.
1 - Shoutout to Black Swan by Nassim Taleb for this term to describe our newly exponential world.