Will A.I. Ruin the Planet or Save the Planet? It’s a notorious energy hog. But artificial intelligence can also foster innovation and discovery, & it could speed the global transition to cleaner power

Gen AI is not going to save the planet. It is not capable of synthetic thought or really any thought. It is great for certain use cases but, by itself, will never be capable of general intelligence - just not possible with the technology.

This "AI will save us" reasoning is little different from "pie in the sky when you die". It's dismissing the need to take responsibility and make societal changes while placing faith in a technology that not only have shown anything to justify it but, in fact, continues to prove that it's a losing bet.

Normally, I'm all for whatever salves ease the burden of human existence but, when they are objectively harmful, like mainlining heroin, or that a linguistic statistical analysis program can save the biosphere from anthropogenic collapse, so we don't have to worry and people can keep on raking in cash while contributing in no small way to said collapse, well, no. Fuck that.