Today, there are people who have created new ways of working together by building on top of bitcoin, where its not a company or a legal entity of any king, but people who may not know or trust each other in meatspace are collaborating and getting paid for their work as they deliver products and services. And their collaboration is governed by humans, not a smart contract, but in a decentralized manner to protect their project. They're developing software, providing customer support, tutorials, project management, etc, and all of it being paid for by the project---all without bank accounts, a corporation, or geographic dependency.
As far as I'm aware, https://bisq.network/dao/ is the only running project that gas built functioning governance on top of bitcoin. I know that the MakerDAO (that runs the DAI stablecoin) and ShapeShift (altcoin exchange) have been built and are running in top of Ethereum or other altcoins. So that's at least three separate projects creating value in historically new ways.
When I explained this to a sociologist friend of mine, she was amazing, asking who's studying and writing about such historically important innovation.
I fail to see how those aren't examples of how this technology benefits society. Its trailblazing, hinting at the new possibilities that combining the Internet with programmable decentralized permissionless censorship-resistant money could bring to humanity. Only time will show which approaches bear long-term fruit here, but there's a lot of potential.