The benefits from past progress do not imply all future progress will be similarly beneficial. Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. B

The benefits from past progress do not imply all future progress will be similarly beneficial. Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. We may already be on the other side of the critical point. How the benefits from increased efficiency are distributed matter to how much progress benefits average people. Historically, efficiency increases from technology were driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it new classes of jobs and a widespread growth in prosperity. But crucially, the need for human labor kept pace with the expansion of wealth creation. This largely avoided the creation of a new distribution problem. But this time is in fact different. The expanding impact of AI on our economy will create a serious distribution problem as wealth creation becomes more and more decoupled from human labor. It is extremely narrow-minded to ignore this problem. It is not something that will just work itself out.