They free up the greatest capital there is — human ingenuity and intelligence — to devise better and more effective ways to solve global problems.
Why Work As We Know It May Be Immoral
Saul of Hearts
30111

I’m not sure that we have much of any sociotechnical infrastructure that would allow us to as a society to make effective use of all that freed-up ingenuity and intelligence - which is in any event distributed extremely unequally across the population - in a pro-social way. Generating ideas that we can’t implement is probably a recipe more for social frustration and anger than social progress.