But that’s not what happens. Data centers have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger and now we literally talk about planning gigawatt scale data centers. No “data center” took the efficiencies of Moore’s law and said “we good, we can stop making more complicated uses of computers now and just run what we already have on more efficient hardware”.

So then it comes down to, we’ll is that extra processing these data centers doing useful or wasteful? And that’s all subjective. Some of its more clear cut probably: work that leads to new medicine probably useful. Work that hijacks dopamine processes to addict people. Arguably not useful. But how do we determine that fairly? And where would we draw a line on this kind of moral policing of energy use?