> If I invent a fridge and it become commercially available or cheap enough so that people previously not able to purchase it can buy it, it's fairly easy to se

> If I invent a fridge and it become commercially available or cheap enough so that people previously not able to purchase it can buy it, it's fairly easy to see it as value being created. When you think about it, it actually isn't even as obvious as you might think - which is the whole problem you are talking about. Another way to recast it is there is some theoretical optimum use of resources and it is unclear whether the action you took is in line with that optimum or not. In fact, since reality is rather complicated, it probably isn't! I might liken the idea to a chess grand-master watching a club player and a total rookie play. From the grand-master's perspective, both sides are just blundering even though one player is much more likely to win. In the same way some supreme hyper-intelligence might see the fridge creation as a horrific failure to allocate resources to create value and hence value-destructive in relation to the original resources, even though we mere mortals think it is a pretty good idea. All we can really do is compare things and talk about which one is more efficient. So it isn't just notoriously difficult to distinguish, but objectively almost everything we do is probably value destructive (and hence uselessly extractive) compared to a potential optimum allocation. Up until the 1950s or so even the best people managed was still pretty pathetic at creating value by modern standards. They weren't putting enough resources towards correctly creating fertiliser, which is far worse than the milk-dilution example.