Literally pick any of the top 100 most important problems you could have any impact on, none of them are going to be AI cost/impact related. Some might be "what do we do when jobs are gone" AI related. But this is trivial- you could run the site itself on a raspberry pi.
Just because there are worse problems, doesn't mean we shouldn't care about less-worse problems (this is a logical fallacy, I think it's called relative privation).
Further, there is an extremely limited number of problems that I, personally, can have any impact on. That doesn't mean that problems that I don't have any impact on, are not problems, and I couldn't worry about.
My country is being filled up with data centers. Since the rise of LLMs, the pace at which they are being built has increased tremendously. Everywhere I go, there are these huge, ugly, energy and water devouring behemoths of buildings. If we were using technology only (or primarily) for useful things, we would need maybe 1/10th of the data centers, and my immediate living environment would benefit from it.
Finally, the site could perhaps be run on a Raspberry Pi. But the site itself is not the interesting part, it's the LLMs using it.
> Everywhere I go, there are these huge, ugly, energy and water devouring behemoths of buildings.
Everywhere you go? Really?
The water consumption is minor, btw. Electricity is more impactful but you’d achieve infinitely more advocating for renewables rather than preaching at people about how they’re supposed to live in mudhuts.