what’s the alternative that doesn’t have a bunch of evil people destroying others for fun?

I think it comes down to conditioning. Perhaps we don't scale economically, so there is no answer, but I don't really believe that. It is more of an alignment issue, where what we currently want, isn't aligned with what we need to do.

It is definitely complex, but I also think that perhaps if we were aligned toward wellbeing, we would still innovate, just in a different way. Doing it for money though, innovates in a direction that will always cost humanity eventually - or parts of humanity perhaps.