I agree that we should not dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. But the central argument of the article can be made without that point. Because

I agree that we should not dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. But the central argument of the article can be made without that point. Because the truth is that right now, LLMs are good enough to be a force multiplier for those who know how to use them. Which eventually becomes synonymous with "those who have power". This means that the power of AI will naturally get used to further the ends of corporations. The potential problem there is that corporations are natural paperclip maximizers. They operate on a model of the world where "more of this results in more of that, which gets of more of the next thing, ..." And, somewhere down the chain, we wind up with money and resources that feed back into the start to create a self-sustaining, exponentially growing loop. (The underlying exponential nature of these loops has become a truism that people rely on in places as different as finance, and technology improvement curves.) This naturally leads to exponential growth in resource consumption, waste, economic growth, wealth, and so on. In the USA this growth has averaged about 3-3.5% per year. With growth varying by area. Famously, growth rates tend to be much higher in tech. Likewise growth rates are higher in some areas than others. (The best known example is the technology curve described by Moore's law. Which has had a tremendous impact on our world.) The problem is that we are undergoing exponential growth in a world with ultimately limited resources. Which means that the most innocuous things will eventually have a tremendous impact. The result isn't simply converting everything into a mountain of paperclips. We have mountains of many different things that we have produced, and multiple parallel environmental catastrophes from the associated waste. Even with no agency, AI serves as a force multiplier for this underlying dynamic. But since AI is being inserted as a crucial step at so many places, AI is on a particularly steep growth curve. Estimates for total global electricity spent on AI are in the range 0.2-0.4%. That seems modest, but annual growth rates are projected as being in the range of 10-30%. (The estimates are far apart because a lot of the data is not public, and so has to be estimated.) This is a Moore's law level growth. We are likely to see the electricity consumption of AI grow past all other uses within our lifetimes. And that will happen even without the kind of sudden leaps in capability that machine learning regularly delivers. I hope we humans like those paperclips. Humans, armed with AI, are going to make a lot of them. And they're not actually free.