You want to get rid of them. Then they'll be replaced by cells that have less damage or no damage. Skin is a lot more complicated than most people think. Your skin is not only the biggest and heaviest organ in the body, its complexity is second only to the central nervous system, the brain and spinal cord. A major function of the skin is to maintain the immune system.
Ultraviolet light increases the risk of cancer by damaging the skin's immune system.
What happens is the skin has less ability for immune surveillance of cells that didn't commit suicide but were supposed to. The skin isn't just something that's sitting there passively between you and the outside world. It's actively responding to the things that the outside world is doing and deciding what's going to get in, how to respond to this or that stimulation or damage. There is a lot of similarity between the skin and the central nervous system, and I don't just mean the nerves that are buried in the skin. That's a high concentration.