There is one key difference though, drivers and car manufacturers are sometimes held accountable for their actions

boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.

Not so long ago, face to face interaction was the only way business was transacted, people were employed and paid.

In today's world, if we could get past the baseless RTO mandates and let the 60% or whatever it is of modern workers work from home or wherever is convenient for them to work, get the commuters off the roads, restructure the food distribution systems to eliminate that need for cars, we really could make a significant improvement in the environmental impact of cars and trucks.

In the world of AI, I suspect a huge chunk of current AI usage, energy burned in data centers, etc. is "wasteful" - investigational, experimental, learning usage. If we can get past that kind of usage and eventually use it for what it's good for and leave it alone for counterproductive wastes of time, it should also be a clear net-benefit for "getting stuff done" not only faster, but more correctly and valuably. Which software is more valuable: one coded by humans over the course of a year, with a half dozen undiscovered security vulnerabilities, or one coded by those same humans over the course of a month with those vulnerabilities exposed and fixed?

If you're concerned about the environment, those humans commuting to work for an extra 11 months add up to far more environmental impact than the AI they used to accelerate their work. Good luck getting their employer to give them 10 months off with pay for delivering the same valuable product faster and better.

Correct - knives do more good than harm, even when some people use them irresponsibly. My point is that AI doesn't; even when some people could arguably say that they use it responsibly and do good work, those that use it for slop, to perpetuate disinformation, and to further degrade our ability to think critically outweigh those people.

You might want to rethink that position: https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

"Guns cause a lot of shootings, so let's ban guns"

~ any reasonable country on the planet

All those things, including knives, are heavily regulated, yes.