The Jevons paradox, namely that making things more efficient increases demand is very well established, dating back to 1865. He reasonably accurately predicted the downfall of the British Empire on the basis of rate of coal consumption versus available stocks - only staved off a little by other fuel types coming in.
It's no different with computing I'm afraid. Max power consumption of a 486 DX2/66 was about 6 or 7 watts.
Today, an "average" CPU - Ryzen 5 3500X - TDP of 65W. Obviously vastly more potent, but there are many more PC's in circulation today than there were in 1994. Hell, I have 3 in the house (admittedly, not used all the time!) In most use cases, most of that power isn't being "productively" used... Though to be fair the proportions of 486's used for productivity might not be that far removed from current CPU.
AI though brute force of processing I increasingly find distasteful. It's CPU hungry, training it requires experienced scientists and data scientists to work together, and calibration mostly consists of tuning models to return the results you expected to see in the first place through other means. At least this is true in the fields of electrical and mechanical engineering. It would be known in other circles as a confirmation bias, and frankly, unless you are really prepared to dig carefully, seems to be a near universal outcome of so many machine learning applications. See also, Monte-carlo models tuned to produce the manager wanted to hear.
Case in point. I like books on military history. Amazon runs flashy algorithms to advertise to me things that relate to books I've bought before. But did it really need those flashy algorithms to work out that having bought a few books by James Holland, I would probably be interested in Max Hastings?
How much power is burned, needlessly to do this? And can needless compute (and therefore power) be saved by cutting down on bad/expensive/pointless analysis. Until such time we have Fusion power and literally more power than one could rationally use per head knocking about. If the species doesnt destroy itself that quickly first.
Another obvious example is the energy being burned for Crypto to obfuscate transaction chains - a role cash used to play, albeit cash is harder to move around. I wouldn't mind if the energy was carbon free, however, when marginal coal/gas has to be burned to push crypto bits around, governments should be stepping in to curtail it. What was it, power use estimates up to levels equivalent Argentine national demand? Ridiculous. (All in the name of what has become a Ponzi scheme, too.)