>Weirdly, underutilization of hardware was never a problem before. In fact, wastefulness is so ingrained in programming culture that the previous hype - blockchain - was about an explicit race over who could waste the most computing power on nonsensical calculations.

Same with AI. AI use is a colossal waste, for all kinds of frivolous purposes (e.g. some person's ai girfriend chat, or someone asking about K-pop lore, or slop image generation, or slop "dark internet posts"), but also to facilitate "serious" business that we'd be better if it wasn't done at all.