Yep that’s my point. That they just assumed that it must be the case when that hasn’t been the outcome with innovation not coinciding with improved affordable living. Instead it’s just been further class divide despite advancements.

Innovation is its own separate thing from human outcomes, and advancement of improved human lives needs its own care and guidance. Its not going to improve just because science and tech is improving. Otherwise humans are no different than any other disposable resource from the view of the powers that be, and will be discarded and abused without care.

Which are separate things from people’s ability to financially support themselves.

People can have smartphones and tech the past didn’t have, but be increasingly worse off financially and unable to afford housing.

And you aren’t a space explorer.

I’m not arguing about whether innovation is cool. It is.

I however strongly disagree with your claim that people being replaced is good. That assumes society is being guided with altruism as a cornerstone of motivation to create some Star Trek future to free up people to pursue their interests, but that’s a fantasy. Innovation is simply innovation. It’s not about whether people’s lives will be improved. It doesn’t care.

World can be the most technologically advanced its ever been with space travel for the masses and still be a totalitarian dystopia. People could be poorer than ever and become corpo slaves, but it would fit under the defition of societal progress because of innovation.

Great for people getting fired or finding that now the jobs they used to have that were middle class are now lower class pay or obsolete. They will be so delighted at the progress despite their salaries and employment benefits and opportunities falling.

And it’s so nice that AI is most concentrated in the hands of billionaires who are oh so generous with improving living standards of the commoners. Wonderful.

Got to be really deranged to vote for a candidate that ran on a platform of revenge and hate, and there’s at the minimum 70 million of those types of Americans which outnumbers many individual countries. Americans suck and don’t seem nice. Too many bad apples.

Don’t visit unless it is a life or death situation. I wouldn’t want to go into country that wants to finger print me, hand over social media, and copy my devices.

Especially a foreign social media company with algorithm that isn’t transparent and has the power to block whatever users and posts they want to push the desired narrative. Its not a free and open platform but a propaganda tool of a single billionaire.

It is interesting that forums had less people but felt very active and didn’t need the millions of people that places like modern day social media do.

And I think big part of it is the presentation of material with threads that get bumped up when people comment and can keep going on for years.

In reddit type social media a thread is considered dead after like a day or less, so needing a new one even if it is the same topic to start up conversation again. Even more the case for one off comment type social media like mastodon.