As long as AI uses unsustainable amounts of energy and water, it is not neutral. It is awful.

I see that and to a certain extend I agree, though I am much more on the "anti AI" side of the argument myself. I do think it is not as neutral as you make it sound, though. Like it is an especially pernicious tool under capitalism or feudalism, in that it allows a really aggressive extraction of value from the commons into the private sector. And even if it doesn't necessarily replace that many jobs, the perception among management is that they can at least use AI as an excuse to make fewer people do the work of many. If enough employers hold that line then the balance of power will shift to management, no matter how talented the workers.

Disclaimer: I have read the article yet, so just reacting to your comment. Hopefully I'm not too far off base. :)

Spot on about context shaping tech - reminds me of how radio was once seen as this revolutionary democratizing force until comercial interests completely restructured it's use.

Capitalism is nothing more than a collection of tools. Changing who hold the tools doesn't change anything. Charitable billionaires that give their wealth away just means that in 20 years time wealth has re-accumulated with the next set of legal persons that exploit everything for short-term gain. The problem isn't bad people, it's the system itself.

The only way to change how capitalism operates is by changing the tools that society uses (where changing the people at the top can be indirectly useful by creating a window to do this). Failing that, you can at least try to prevent capitalism from accumulating more tools that enforce its structure.

AI by itself is nothing in the same way a Maxim gun by itself is nothing. Through its shapes - the cost of its computations, the scale of its data collection and the methods that scale requires, the legal ownership of its weights and outputs, perhaps even its moral patienthood, and the reward signal of its fine-tuned training - it requires a certain shape of society be made and used, and it imparts a certain shape upon society.

So AI has a place in a solarpunk society in the same way as biological weapons research does. Cancer detection AI are great, and it's also nice to be able to preventatively research how to stop future pandemics, but their shape puts them at odds with solarpunk ethos. If they must be used they should be encapsulated by a tightly monitored system, so that that system can take the shape of something beneficial.

AI is a sword, we should not use it unless we can make it into a plowshare. And at that point, is it still a sword?

Well AI is the exploration of how to reason about how reasoning occurs. Which is why early on there was massive progress in areas such as constraint solvers and recursive problem solving (like SHRDLU) but once we started to try to do things that we don't know how we do (like look at a picture of a bird and know it is a bird) things basically slowed nearly to a stop until computing grew to the level brute force solutions could be tested.