Quick dumb question: does it seem like saying AI development is a threat to the climate a convenient excuse to put a stop to a technology that is disruptive to existing corporations and systems of power?
With deep learning, the more data and computing power you have, the better your system will be. For that, you need lots of resources, which big corporations and "existing systems of power" have. This will let them have the best AIs, making them even more powerful.
This positive feedback loop is, I think, the most credible AI-related threat.
But that doesn’t change the reality of the underlying threat.
- if we get full AGI, it is likely to kill us all as a side-effect while achieving its imperfectly aligned goals. Hopefully, we are far from it - even without full AGI, AI can become smart enough to help its users see through the BS/propaganda (dangerous for the most powerful eg, the military budget wouldn't have any sense if AI even slightly aligned with human values) - the most likely variant: if we believe "no moat" people that generative AI can be democratized, then the hyped fear of AI can be used to push regulations to prevent the democratization, as an anti-competitive measure, so that only few corporations may access the technology legally.
Either way, my observation is simply that I could see a lot of parties finding the advancement of human potential through AI to be harmful to the status quo that they comfortably exist in.