or as an assistant

Is there any field where an assistant is worthless? I find GitHub CoPilot almost indispensable and soon equivalents will be available for nearly any industry.

Mostly though, I reject the idea that AI is a massive burden on our energy grid. It's well under 1% of global energy consumption right now and I don't see that changing. Yes, it's going up, but other things are going up too.

For example cars are getting bigger and heavier, which means they use more energy. More and more people around the world are heating/cooling their home to make it comfortable instead of just liveable - drastically increasing energy consumption. We build homes with concrete instead of timber. We're using more and more concrete worldwide... and concrete makes up something like eight percent of global energy consumption now (and growing).

We need to produce more energy. There's no way around it.