There’s a lot of good points in your comment, but fwiw it’s not clear whether they exist to dismiss a complaint or muster focus on the issues.

You’re right to point out that we’re all opted in at multiple levels to tech dependent on mining operations with a terrible human cost. I’d love to see these dangerous mining operations made safer with tech and policy, and you’re quite right that individual opt out is unlikely to have any effect (much less selective opt out from LLMs). Is that the end of the story?

If we’re just here to complain that someone’s marginal harm reduction posture is marginal I’m not sure that’s an effective rebuttal. Collective effort to lay new tracks and untie people off the old ones has more power than complaining someone used their personal trolley switch to shunt to a track with slightly fewer people.

Of course, that goes for people manning their personal switches too. And it’s worthwhile to pause and appreciate the scale and complexity of the problem.

I think my main point is that these particular concerns largely depend on someone already sharing the author's opinion - that AI is bad. They're not convincing otherwise because most other IT buildouts (e.g. "cloud computing", cryptocurrency) have a lot of the same drawbacks. Whether these costs are worth it or not then depends entirely on the nature of the technology they're being used for (which is why I brought up green tech).