There are two separate issues here: whether tech itself is bad, and whether the way it is deployed is bad. Better AI is, in principle, the kind of tech that can massively change the world for the better. In practice it is being deployed to maximize profits because that's what we chose to incentivize in our society above everything else, but the problem is obviously the incentives (and the people that they enable), not the tech itself.
Profit is fine. It's how society tells you that your customers value what you are producing more than it costs you to produce (after paying suppliers and workers etc). That's how you avoid the massive misallocations of Soviet communism.
(Well, the Soviets did have one sector that performed reasonably well, and that's partially because they set plenty of decent incentives there: weapons production and the military.)
Now you could say that the 'wrong' activities are profitable. And, I agree and I am all for eg CO2 taxes or making taxes on equity financing cheaper than those on debt and deposits (to incentivise companies, especially banks, to rely more on stocks than on debt, to decrease brittle leverage in the economy); or lowering subsidies for meat production or for burning food instead of eating it etc.
There are two separate issues here: whether tech itself is bad, and whether the way it is deployed is bad. Better AI is, in principle, the kind of tech that can massively change the world for the better. In practice it is being deployed to maximize profits because that's what we chose to incentivize in our society above everything else, but the problem is obviously the incentives (and the people that they enable), not the tech itself.