There are certainly ecological costs, but in the long run, Earth's life will only survive if an advanced species like ours is able to transport it off the planet before the sun expands and boils away the ocean and atmosphere, in approximately 800 million years.

Have people (smarter than me) come up with a good equation - or at least heuristic - to determine what inventions are morally good?

I suppose it'd be from a utilitarian perspective?

Ex: My gut feeling is nitrogen fixing would rank "low" on "terminal ecological impact" against "positive benefits to humanity"; the Vinyl resurgence would be around the middle; private jets for the Epstein class would the highest etc.

Yup. Best unplug your computer.

An AI chatbot diagnosed my rolled shoulders. I had assumed I had bad workout form. I would google "discomfort in upper back" or whatever and it would say "back pain after exercise means take a rest" and I would rest and it wouldn't get better until I lost interest in working out. It never occurred to me that this could be a medical problem, so I never asked a doctor (not that I had one to ask, as I was working retail at the time). Last time I started working out, I went to ChatGPT instead of google and it said "here's your problem, here's how to fix it" and it was right and I continue to work out and my quality of life has risen tremendously. YMMV

I would see less fake news, fake profiles and fake content in general. I would be happier, even if I would miss some of it. It’s kind of sad how much we accept the idea of ”trust absolutely nothing” nowadays, even movie trailers for fictional movies are made to drive clicks for ads… obviously there has always been a large trust issue online, but with gen ai we entered a new era of it.