[Cthulhu_]

I'm going to be cynical.

Energy usage: Software can't fix this; rewriting your workload more efficiently doesn't matter if during that rewrite, a hundred companies wrote workloads that cost a hundred times more power did. The issue is that electricity is too cheap. Raise the cost of electricity and it will force the big consumers of electricity to use it more efficiently. Also ban proof-of-work blockchain technology.

Software cannot prevent armed conflicts, that's a political problem. That can be solved by voting or assassinations, to be blunt. Politics is broken, and software cannot fix that, revolutions can. It doesn't matter that you can vote remotely on the blockchain if you're in a two-party system where your vote is for the lesser evil. Ban nukes. Stop voting for oligarchs, authoritarians, and fuckwits.

Poverty is a political problem too. The free market didn't work. Raise the minimum wage, give people money if they can't work or are between jobs, give everyone an education for free (it pays itself back within a few years through income taxes no problem), give people health care (and control the prices). Yes it's totalitarian, but we tried the free market and the illusion of free choice and it didn't work. We're rich enough to give everyone a happy life but we refuse to because "I got mine".

STEM training, see above. Make it free for anyone to attend.

AI is not needed, it's used to sell you more stuff. I've yet to see a beneficial application for AI. I hope it can be used for medical science at least but a lot of it is gimmicky.

[loudmax]

Paying for universal education, health care, and basic income via taxation is not totalitarian. With sensible regulation all of these can be accomplished without giving up on the free market. That is, the free market as understood by Keynes, not necessarily by Ayn Rand.

If you take an extremist definition of the free market, where healthcare mandates equal socialism and taxation equals theft, then yeah, that version of the free market doesn't work. (Where "work" means having leading to the general benefit to society as a whole.) Believing that any economic regulation is incompatible with a free market is equivalent to believing that any law is incompatible with freedom. Just as anarchy won't lead to freedom, a complete absence of economic regulation will not lead to a free market.

[Bedon292]

I guess it depends on what OP means by Energy usage. I thought it was more about clean energy than about the energy usage of individual workloads. And there are certainly opportunities for software in clean energy. Things like improving site selection, grid optimizations, and the like. Although a lot of it is probably going to be hardware side.