Crafting the automation itself can be fun. That is one of my favorite part of designing systems running on Kubernetes.
I have also come to the conclusion that, right now, AIs lack imagination. So designing human-AI collaboration that lets human imagination in the loop would be interesting.
If we’re going by water, land, etc as an argument against wasteful activities … Coming from the permaculture world, I can tell you just how wasteful the pre-AI world is. The ideas in the mainstream environmental-friendly practices are themselves very wasteful.