This would stop the currently exponential pace of growth from outpacing what society, and regulation, can adapt to. Thus avoiding the inevitable crash that will happen when we lose control of the exponentially accelerating train of technology, and it flies off the rails.
The narrative of needing to progress all the time, in any way possible, is just too strong. And unfortunately, globally, it makes sense: if we don’t do it, somebody else will. This is the material for hypes & bubbles, yet it still continues.
And it’s a question of money. Financial growth is basically a synonym for progress.
I remember one of my school teachers explaining to us exponential growth and built-in obsoletion: economists theorize that economies follow a certain wave pattern: it goes up for a while, it comes down for a while. That’s a healthy economy. And this was reality for a while, until roughly the 1970s* iirc. Then something changed, and suddenly it became overwhealmingly important to uphold growth, at all cost. Like healthy tissue developing cancer. I think you can see how built-in obsoletion (and similar concepts like fashion, design etc.) plays an important role here: it’s what keep consumers buying.
So I, an innocent teenager, asked: “But wouldn’t it be better for everybody if we changed back to a more sustainable economy & production?” And the answer was “Yes, and they know it, but it would require a problematic transitional period of maybe a few decades, and not a single politician/party on the whole planet will risk that.”
That was 40 years ago. Since then I believe that education (and much better education than what we have nowadays) is the only way out of this mess, in the long term.
* what happened then?
edit: I wonder if the downvoters would like to explain themselves?
the best explanation i’ve found is the hirtenstabmodell (not sure how to translate this to english, maybe “shepherd’s staff model”?). i’ve never seen a single article about it published unfortunately so i can’t link to it. it’s all hearsay from close friends.
i’m not sure how to start explaining. it’s a long and convoluted story. anyways it ends up saying that yes, infinite exponential growth cannot be sustainable, but within certain chapters of human history it is still the way to go. a whole lot of technology got developed since 1970. basically all of IT, but also international relations (globalism, and end to the cold war, relations to china, etc.)