The closest I can think of would be the atom bomb, but even that arguably brought significant value in terms of relative geopolitical stability.
Very often technology advancements redistribute value, taking it away from many people and allowing companies to capture more profit and/or lower costs. Such as self-serve checkouts at supermarkets leading to less cashier jobs.
> A huge amount of economic value is going to be created by AI. Company builders focused on delivering value to end users will be rewarded handsomely.
Companies will acrue value, but 'common folk' will lose it.
I haven't analyzed its economics, but I would assume that by reducing the cashier jobs (e.g. allowing 1 operator to manage 8 self-serve checkout stations), supermarkets reduce their overall operating costs, and then use that to reduce their prices (and if they won't their competitors will), leading to a benefit to us 'common folk'.
As for cashier jobs, I don't think there's anything inherently good about them or inherently bad about them disappearing from the economy. As another example, I don't know many people who miss the Elevator Operators[0], and it makes perfect sense for us to press the buttons ourselves.
Unfortunately, what reduces the operating costs even more is giving the job of managing 8 self-serve checkouts to existing employee, on top of their current workload. With reliability of the checkout machines being as bad as it is, this results in a very frustrating shopping experience.
This is a pattern that we can see happening in everywhere across every sector in the market: the price for the buyer may get lower, but so does the quality. Often enough, it's impossible to retain quality and stay profitable, so the whole product or service class suddenly becomes worse. In the end, the delta between current satisfaction and the minimum satisfaction below which the customer would bounce, is a profit margin being extracted when competitive pressure is high - which, I dare say, sucks for the customer, even if they also get stuff cheaper.
