I am not arguing tech cannot improve lives, I'm arguing it doesn't happen by itself. Technology is mostly neutral, and does to us what we set out to do with it. But since technology is ran and owned not by the people, but by an elite that has interests that run counter to those of the people, getting any improvements to filter down to the population at large is either a happy accident, or takes a great effort and struggle.

Starting with the stone age, no, you're just plain projecting savage beast stereotypes into the past. What we know about the stone age is mostly egalitarian with a side of matriarchy.. Different places in different times have of course had different societies, but one thing is certain - until technology and civilization lifted us out of the constant fight for survival, nobody could afford to hold down women in a serious way. They were needed to be on the front lines of the struggle, motivated, able, and capable. And once we get into times where we have records of unspeakable things like bride price, we also get records of dowry and dower, ruining our hopes of having a black and white world. And as one of my teachers put it about ancient Greece - the man was the head of the house, controlling the land, the estate, and the slaves. The woman had no say in that. But the woman controlled the man, so whatever she wanted to happen, happened.

For an age of great inequality between the sexes, look into postwar US. Those times surely must have been technologically advanced enough to not oppress women, right? And they were, but yet, kinder, küche, kirche. Only when our lives have improved enough that we do not need women to sweat and toil with us every day can we lock them up in the house, be that figuratively or literally.

So coming to the tech. Agriculture was not made our major food source to make our lives better, the monoculture grain diet was worse than the hunter-gatherer varied diet in a major way. But the armies needed storable food, so we were forced to settle down and plow the fields. We invented gunpowder, and other than fireworks, all it ever did was make everyone's life worse. We invented TV to spread information, yet we use it exclusively for propaganda and dumbing down the populace. We invented the world wide web again to spread information and usher in a new era of the empowered individual, yet we use it for porn, surveillance, and hating our neighbour based on brainrot clickbait headlines. Nobody is even pretending AI is meant to improve anyone's life, the only hope of a business model it has is getting the headcount down at every company everywhere. Where are the fired people supposed to get jobs in a deindustrialized society, nobody knows and nobody cares, but the way the US is going about such problems, I'm seeing a jobless -> homeless -> hole in the ground pipeline not too far in the future. And no, I'm not feeling threatened in my job security by AI.

The thing with AI is, it does have potential to improve our lives, if we get rid of the idea that a job is how someone is supposed to feed and shelter themselves. But with the good will and competence our elites have, that's not happening unless the world burns first. But after the burn, we might be back in the fields again.

Social problems are solved by people, if they set out to do so. They will use whatever technology is available and applicable, but the will to solve the problems is primary. Whatever new fancy technology one might invent, if nobody cares to use it to solve a social problem, it will not happen. And as the world always has stood and still stands, what is holding us back is the will, not the technology.

Calling people names already, are we. But you are at least something on topic with communism, it pairs inherently with the Industrial Revolution, as it was invented as a result of witnessing the exploitation of the factory workers.

The quality of life of an average English person in the 19th century was child labor, cold, undernourished and overworked, if lucky enough to have a job. The luddites did not fight to keep their great jobs, they fought to have any job at all, because the alternative was to starve. The truth is, the life of a factory worker during the Industrial Revolution was much worse than a farmer's. The farmer was his own boss, built his own housing, managed their own firewood, made their own clothing, and never starved unless the crops failed not only on their farm, but everywhere else too. The factory worker was subject to the whims of the factory owner, was never secure in his income, yet dependent on it for everything he had, was in a constant losing struggle to pay his expenses, and starved not only on crop failure years, but on a regular basis because of a lack of money, and was also subject to constant outbreaks of disease like cholera, as a result of poor hygiene in a densely packed population. Everyone's life was, to put it in Hobbes' words, nasty, brutish, and short, and this was especially true of the factory worker. It took time and effort until unions, social democracy, and the threat of communism managed to get the benefits of the Industrial Revolution to start to benefit the people, like with safety nets and social security.

Pax Britannica, however, has nothing to do with any of that, but it does have to do with imperial violence, death, destruction, and pillaging all around the world. But as one would expect, there is a symmetry between the attitude of the Empire towards other peoples overseas, and towards their own people at home.

Are you sure you know who a luddite was? You speak as if they were the factory owners or something. A luddite was an out of work wage slave. Calling one as profiting from slavery... it's a bit rich, but a good example of shifting the blame.

The ones who profited were the slave owners in the US, and the capitalists in Britain. Both legs of this arrangement were built on systematic exploitation of the disenfranchised, and to call one exploited as profiting from another exploited, all the while turning a blind eye the actual exploiters... disingenious at best.

As a rule of thumb, social problems are not solved by technological means. And the way we run society, new tech usually adds to, or creates whole new social problems.

The issue with poverty, inequality, war and famine is not that everything has been attempted, but that not much at all has been attempted. But there have been successes here and there. The Chinese have lifted 1B people out of poverty during the last four decades or so. The inequality situation in the US was pretty good starting from FDR, up until the neoliberals got in power with Reagan (and every president since) and started to sell the country for scrap, culminating in the US of today. The EU basically got started as a project to make war not happen in Europe again. Famine could be solved today, the world has enough food, the only problem is distribution.

As you can see, none of these is a technological problem, but a political one. When there's a will, there's a way, it's just that we rarely have the will.

The Luddites fought against social problems, namely, the fleeting ability to support oneself in their contemporary capitalist economy. You will find that pretty much every riot everywhere ever boils down to peoples ability to feed their families. The machines just found themselves as the poster child of the problem, in the same way that AI is now the poster child of our contemporary capitalist economy, where one's ability to support oneself and their family is more and more in question. Also do not let slip past you the fact that in both the merchant capitalism of the Luddite times, and the financial capitalism of our times, for a huge amount of people there's no economy but the gig economy available.

The Luddites did not go away because technology solved their, or anyone else's problems. They went away because they were brutalized, and machine breaking was made a capital crime. Over time, left to their own problems, people either starved, or found a way. Nothing about this was a success story of a technological victory parade, but a saga of our failure to be human. One that has a nonzero chance to repeat itself in the near future.

Every bad thing has the you can avoid it angle. It does not mean it's okay the bad thing exists.

Insider trading, but with the fun twist of looting not the stock market, but the general populace. Now there's a direct and no fuss way for our leadership to take money out of our pockets.

Good ol' Lambert's rules of neoliberalism:

Rule #1: Because markets.

Rule #2: Go die!

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/03/neo-liberalism-expressed-simple-rules.html

Looking forward to the release of the lizard files, because it sure ain't human that our leaders rape minors and eat childern.

For shits and giggles, let's hear your proof of the nonexistence of god...

More like Dawkins is hoping for a new god to replace the one he rejected...

One might argue the quote also describes Dawkins himself...

Same thing...

Sounds like anything else coming from White House...

And that is one of the ideas that make up the problem set.

One of the greatest tricks the devil ever pulled on us was the idea that he did not exist; one of the greatest tricks our upper classes pulled on us was the idea that class does not exist.

This is of course why a politician can don a baseball cap and appear to be one of the people. A millionaire, brought up in a closed community, went to Ivy League, never did a days work in his life, never spoke to one of the people other than to get them to leave or to have a photo op, would not be able to tell you what a coffee costs even if his life depended on it. Yes, of course, that guy is exactly the same as us, with exactly the same life experiences, world view, and problems. And yes, of course, when you gather them together, their collective interests are exactly the same as us, certainly not in conflict in any way.

Except, idk, look at where the US is right now, with the complete harmony of rich and poor, and of the middle class, which definitely is a thing that is flourishing. The rising tide has indeed been lifting all of the boats; everything that has been sucked up has been definitely trickling down; and the job creators, yes, definitely creating jobs galore thanks to all the tax breaks.

Bridge for sale in Brooklyn.