The argument is that you can't say activity A increases or decreases net energy demand without modeling whether there are activities B, C, D, ... whose energy d

The argument is that you can't say activity A increases or decreases net energy demand without modeling whether there are activities B, C, D, ... whose energy demands will decrease if activity A happens. The implication is that AI may save more energy than it consumes. One made up possibility: maybe you can spend some energy on AI to optimize a supply chain, and that saves 50x as much energy every year after the supply chain is optimized. The driving example was just that: an example. Driving obviously consumes energy, but what if, for example, you're a home energy efficiency contractor, and you're driving to a job to insulate a house, and that's going to lead to a net decrease in energy much greater than the energy you consumed to get there.