I know a very good engineer, who used to design innovative chips for 4G/LTE mobile telephony. These chips contributed to the market position of one of today's leading mobile phone manufacturers.
Today, this engineer is designing ASICs for high frequency trading (basically a specialised Ethernet switch, with all extra logic stripped out, so packets go through a few nanoseconds faster).
HFT isn't a zero sum game. It's sucking resources away from productive disciplines into an unproductive discipline, so making a net negative contribution.
Note: by spreads I mean the difference between buy and sell prices. I don't know if there is a special word for it in this context.
Each futures pit used to have hundreds of traders, who required several assistants/support and commanded a huge salary. Many firms needed multiple traders in a pit, just to be able to make sure they could provide liquidity to all possible market participants. Today, a couple strategists with a small team of programmers can cover dozens of futures markets at once.
The same principle holds across bond, FX, equity and options markets alike. HFT has supplanted a terribly inefficient market with a better one. Is it perfect or even good? Probably not, but it's magnitudes better than the traditional method.
At best HFT is a near zero sum game. It isn't creating value for customers. It isn't making the world a better place.
It is an unfortunate flaw of our economic system that so many smart people put so much effort into playing zero sum games with each other.