Because they've grown accustomed to that, just like people grow accustomed to other unpleasant conditions if they persist for long enough. Anything new gets pushback, even if it's better than what it replaced.

Get rid of unnecessary journeys and you massively reduce energy consumption irrespective of the source of that energy.
If freed from the drudgery of having to attend a physical office every day a lot of people could do without a car at all.

Yes, and those workers would be able to prove it quite easily so there wouldn't be any problem there. They would also experience higher pay for the commuting time, and less congestion.
Besides, roughnecks typically stay aboard for the duration of their contract so they're not commuting every day.

The most congested cities are full of office workers who have no actual need to work in the office. Grocery stores are far more spread out, and mines tend to be located away from population centers with workers often residing nearby too.

Your work environment at home is under your control, and you have greater flexibility here if your living location is not dictated by having to travel daily to a workplace.
If you get a full remote position you can go live somewhere cheaper, so that for the same price you get a larger house and dedicate a room for work. Buy a decent comfortable chair that suits your body size and shape, a decent desk and a high quality monitor.

Most offices have standardised equipment and won't buy equipment that suits you, they might not even buy decent quality equipment. I've worked in many offices that bought the cheapest possible desks/chairs which were horribly uncomfortable and frequently broken. They also had the cheapest possible monitors which had a poor resolution, poor contrast and caused eyestrain. Typically also they skimp out on connectivity, so simple online operations are slower than necessary - and this is made worse if a lot of infra is moved to cloud instead of being on-prem at the same location.
Yes most offices suck, you can do a lot better at home.

Whoever set up that policy gets warm fuzzies by having it, rather than doing other things that could actually mitigate the risks should a single employee workstation (root or not) become compromised.

Actually if you have a standalone workstation that you setup and manage yourself this will often be significantly lower risk, as there will be no shared credentials on it that could be used for lateral movement. The typical AD model of shared authentication provides plenty of options for lateral movement, and there are many commonly deployed "security processes" that claim to be beneficial while actually providing additional lateral movement opportunities.

Several companies i audited ran nightly scans of every device that logged in remotely as a privileged user to do the scan. Once you compromised a single workstation you just had to wait for the nightly scan and steal its token, then you had access to pretty much everything.

If you're physically in the office then you can prove your arrival time based on the time you swipe through the entrance door.

And as for the rest, you underestimate how slow some machines can be. Corporate desktops tend to be the cheapest available hardware purchased in bulk, and then loaded up with lots of bloatware that slows it down. Those in IT tend to have more powerful hardware so they don't notice or care about the time consumed by other employees.
Plus the servers that people interact with during this time were probably idle overnight or performing some sort of backup/maintenance tasks, the software used when people log in will likely have been swapped out. When lots of users are all trying to log in at the same time it not only has to reload these swapped out processes, it also has to process a large number of logins simultaneously. But since this only happens once a day the overall load on the server isn't high when averaged over the whole day, so the server isnt considered underspecced or upgraded.

You get a lot of junk on most corporate laptops - AV, EDR, spyware, remote management, monitoring etc.
I had a personal laptop which was an identical model to the company supplied work laptop (in this case a macbook pro so no windows involved) and it booted noticeably quicker, although sleep is reliable on macs so most of us just put it to sleep instead of shutting down at the end of the day.

For others i see with windows laptops the problem tends to be even worse.

Unnecessary commuting is one of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions, and covid proved that with significant drops in co2 emissions when people were working from home.
There needs to be regulations to prevent employers from forcing unnecessary commuting, such as:

Right to work remotely unless it can be proven that your job absolutely requires presence in a specific location.
Make commuting time work time, requiring employees to be paid for it.
Tax employers based on the number of commuting hours across their employee base.
Require employers to offer relocation assistance for permanent employees who absolutely need to be in a specific location.
Flexible/staggered hours so employees can avoid peak travel times.

The one possible upside is that it could set a precedent, and prevent other companies from pulling the same crap in future.

Although it should be obvious, if you're carrying out tasks that your employer has instructed you to perform then you're working and should be paid for the time. If those processes are time consuming it's the employer's fault and their own time they're wasting. Once they can no longer pass the costs of that inefficiency onto employees they might actually do something about it.

No. Like any software, AI requires maintenance, and that maintenance costs money, lots of money.

It does not. Models need nothing more than the storage of some gigs of weights, and a GPU capable of running them.

If you mean "the information goes stale", one, that doesn't happen at all with RAG. And two, updating information with a finetune or even LORA is not a resource-intense task. It's making new foundations that is immensely resource intensive.

Can you integrate it into your products and work flow?

Yes, with precisely the difficulty level of any other API.

Can you train it on your own data?

With much less difficulty than trying to do that with a closed model.

And my point is that AI wouldn't just stop being used even if the bubble imploded so heavily that all of the major AI providers of today went under. It's just too easy to run today. The average person who wants something free would on average use a worse-quality model, but they're not going to just stop using models. And inference costs for higher-end models would crash if the big AI companies were no longer monopolozing the giant datacentres (which will not simply vanish just because their owners lose their shirts; power is only about a third the cost of a datacentre, and it gets even cheaper if you idle datacentres during their local electricity peak-demand times).

They will make it worse because the driver at least has an incentive for his vehicle to be clean. A robot taxi doesn't care if the previous passenger vomited in the seat.

Your scenario is impossible, so try again.

Because we're discussing a scenario where the big AI companies have gone out of business, remember? And the question is whether people just stop using the thing that they found useful, or whether they merely switch to whatever alternative still works.

It's like saying that if Amazon went out of business, people would just stop buying things online because "going to a different website is too hard". It's nonsensical.

They believed you could mimic intelligence with clockwork, etc. Why do you only count if it if it involves computers?

If you want to jump to the era of *modern* literature, the generally first accepted robot in (non-obscure) modern literature is Tik-Tok from the Oz books, first introduced in 1907. As you might guess from the name, his intelligence was powered by clockwork; he was described as no more able to feel emotions than a sewing machine, and was invented and built by Smith and Tinker (an inventor and an artist). Why not electronic intelligence? Because the concept of a programmable electronic computer didn't exist then. Even ENIAC wasn't built until 1945. The best computers in the world in 1907 worked by... wait for it... clockwork. The most advanced "computer" in the world at the time was the Dalton Adding Machine (1902), the first adding machine to have a 10-digit keyboard. At best some adding machines had electric motors to drive the clockwork, but most didn't even have that; they had to be wound. This is the interior of the most advanced computer in the world in the era Tik-Tok was introduced. While in the Greco-Roman era, it might be something like this (technology of the era that, to a distant land that heard of it, probably sounded so advanced that it fueled the later rumours that Greco-Romans were building clockwork humans capable of advanced actions, even tracking and hunting down spies).