Disclaimer: I have a very negative view on this topic, for good or bad reasons, I guess time will tell. But I feel like both sides should be expressed.

> Communication is cheaper. In the past if you moved abroad or simply far enough then you would lose contact with your family. That's not the case anymore. Remember long distance calls?

Yet increasingly more people feel lonely [0] [1]

> Transportation is cheaper/safer.

Which make low wage people live further away from their workplace (ie cities, because they can't afford it), adding hundreds of hours per years to their commute (which aren't compensated, adding both mental and financial stress) [2] [3]

> Food is cheaper.

And of lesser quality, more people than ever are obese in the west too, which imho is a sign of a deep issue and might be related to the general social misery (coping mechanism) [4] [5] [6]. Thanks to globalisation when someone fucks up on the other side of the planet everyone pays the price [7] [8]

> Life expectancy is significantly higher than it was before.

And it's starting to go down almost everywhere in the west [7] [8]

> Perhaps this was unsustainable in the first place?

Perhaps it isn't the only unsustainable thing we started doing

I'm not saying tech progress didn't improve quality of life. I'm saying that very often modern tech "progress" is social and human decline in disguise. Of course it's not all black nor white, but I feel like a lot of new tools are coming with more and more negative side effects attached and these are barely being talked about. Having an HD tv, netflix and cheap Mac&cheese won't do much to your quality of life when you have diabetes, a min wage job with no future perspective and you're not sure you'll be able to pay the next rent or your car payment.

If you look at it from a purely technical point of view, sure, everything is amazing, we send shit on Mars, have 600 miles autonomy electric smart cars, we all have computers in our pockets and can talk to anyone in the world instantly. When you look at it from a human, psychological and social point of view things aren't getting better, especially at the bottom of the social ladder

Running water, central heating, the fridge, the radio, the telephone, early internet, all of these were a thousand times more useful to the average person than anything we came up with in the last decades. I'm talking real world usage that truly improve quality of life, not the carrot(s) on the proverbial stick(s) that keeps low skilled workers commuting in their shitty cars to work their shitty jobs for 45 years straight until they're thrown in a retirement house to rot. No amount of automation or tech thrown in the current framework will solve these issues

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/23/7986764...

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/loneliness-is-rising-younger...

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/25195346?seq=1

[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11116-019-09983-9

[4] https://www.cornucopia.org/2007/06/more-evidence-that-food-n...

[5] https://www.simplysupplements.co.uk/healthylife/infographics...

[6] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

[7] https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2020/09/multi-country-recalls...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Fipronil_eggs_contaminati...

[9] https://www.businessinsider.de/international/us-life-expecta...

[10] https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-life-expectancy-slips-wit...