Probably society would look worse. Almost everything in the world is search-dominated. E.g. one might as well say “if I didn’t have to inspect every element in arrays imagine how much faster I can sort them”. Well then there are lots of arrays you can’t sort. That’s life.

A large amount of labour is dedicated to the search problem. “What is valuable?” is a tough question. Pepper, nutmeg, mace made us a seafaring people. Easy to think “what if we only did the stuff we need” but is meaningless sentence. “What we need” is not something someone can state.