As human organization becomes more complex, the problem of keeping that organization coherent becomes harder. Large scale software system have been the way that organizations have found to solve some parts of this problem. But such systems become harder to change (even to make small changes) as the organization grows as well.

Thus it become necessary or desirable to create adaptive software (such as deep learning systems), that automatically deals with situations in a fashion that constructed or rule-based systems can't easily deal with (or when it would expensive to create such software or when the model isn't known).

Especially decision support seems to be important here - the parole rating program and medical diagnosis software systems, for example, aim to mobilize the huge bulk of data an organization (or all humanity) has to make proper decisions whereas any human making decisions here is going to have a limited viewpoint once the store of data reaches a certain size.

The problem of these systems still being fragile and difficult to maintain, however, means that the problem of increasing complexity still remains. So in a lot of ways, robust AI would be a hope for a way of prevent civilization from essentially collapsing under its own weight.

Whether this is realistic is another question.

This is not a small problem. Thinkers such as Joseph Tainter locate the tendency of civilizations to collapse in the tendency of specialize to increase and cease to be adaptive to a society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter