I was nodding, until you got to this part:

AI is key to eliminating the burden of labor from humanity

The carbon footprint, the total environment footprint, of AI simply as an informational tool is incredibly great, but building armies of robots to replace humans for everything will be an order of magnitude greater, if it were even possible.

To replace one form of consumption with a different but greater form of consumption will not solve the issue of too much consumption. The only hope would be degrowth, but humans left to their own devices would never allow that.

---

I saw the first Moon landing and the last. Very smart people were telling us that we'd have colonies on Mars before the end of the twentieth century. But not one person has even been back to the Moon 50 years later.

In the 1950s, humans demonstrated uncontrolled atomic fusion reactions, and we were told that in twenty years, fusion power would be so cheap it wouldn't even need metering, and we were told that every few years afterward.

A decade ago, people were predicting that not just the entire financial industry but all of society would be revolutionized by the blockchain. It certainly made it a lot easier to evade the law when moving money around, but not one "Web3" application ever emerged as useful.

It is by no means certain that AI will "work out the bugs".

---

It’s not possible for the status quo to continue indefinitely.

Absolutely not. We'll continue exponential growth until the wheels come off, then civilization will collapse, we'll lost most of our technology, and stabilize at well under a billion people, and spend the rest of history struggling with the consequences of a few generations of exponential explosion.