Reducing the cost of a desirable service or product often has a tendency to increased demand for that service or product, and means customers have more capital available to purchase other products and services increasing demand for those. These factors are significant drivers of overall economic growth.

Of course economic growth has it's own problems in terms of ecological impact and such, but if you want to reduce ecological impact you still need to improve productivity. It's a matter of how you spend that efficiency improvement as a society.

Yeah, I'm not convinced either. I'm just saying that's what I think the AI labs believe.