No, man, that's simply not true. That's an incredibly technocratic view of the world.
Using the U.S. as an example, the (belated) end of slavery in the U.S. didn't come about from a scientific discovery or a technological innovation. Technics played a part in the exacerbation of the issues, but it was politics, culture, language, religion and "spirit" that ended state sponsored slavery. I think that was a decently large push forward for society.
As an example, consider reformation: many attempts have been made at reforming the church, but the first successful one happened only after the printing press got widespread enough that the reformational thesis could spread around the Europe very quickly.
Or you could reasonably argue that the end of feudalism happened because of gunpowder and accessible firearms. Where previously a person had to train half of their life to be able to fight with an armoured knight, suddenly with firearms, anyone could become effective in the field in pretty much no time. This shifted power away from the local lords in a significant way.
There are plenty of similar examples you can find in all of history. You can probably shoot plenty of holes through them, too, but still, this for me sounds like a most plausible theory of social changes of the ones I heard.
Just ask the people that have a fulltime job but still cannot afford a place to live if slavery has ended. But sure, politics can change some things but in the end it doesn't change much.
To add to my point, politics may alter how we live but it doesn't bring anything new into the world. If we want to progress, we need to solve issues and take away the need for people to do stuff we don't want them to do. If you had todays farming equipment for example, there would never had been any slaves because one machine can do the job of hundreds of slaves. The machine doesn't have to be fed and managed, the machine doesn't fight back.
I believe we can solve any such problem with technological advancement and thus our money should be heavily invested there.
Who wants to live in a technologically sophisticated world if most of the spending goes to war, surveillance, bailing out rich bankers, healthcare insurance, and just housing, anyways?
What if you would reverse that? Don't you think we would be better off in every way possible?
As technology increases our suicide rate isn't really consistently declining. Our prison population has increased. Technology cant make those improvements alone. We need improvements in governance, culture and education for this to happen.
Technology can be used for good or bad. By itself, it is just a tool, it's up to us to decide if we are going to end up in a police state with constsnt surveillance and tyranny, colonize Mars, create weapons that can wipe out most of humanity, solve healthcare problems, etc.
But we also live in a time with least war and a lot less suffering in general. Technology may be a tool, but science is not. With science we can prove that x makes more people happy and reduces suicide rates and hence make that choice.
The issue is that science is not really that present in the chamber of politics. With a more science-heavy government investments would look a lot different.
I am not advocating for technology alone, basic science plays an equal or even more important role in shaping the society. Science has values and it is the only true values that exist. I would argue that with help of the scienctific method we can figure out what makes people happy and implement it politically. But the progress still starts with science.
You need to put that scientific method you are talking about to use. Are people really happier today than in 1950? Why is the suicide rate going up
The difficulty with your argument here is that tech has enormous potential to make life better, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it will. You may be interested in noting that this is a common idea: I've seen the popular science educators like Sagan, NDT, Nye all say this...
That the Earth is not flat has been known since ancient times. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth.
With increased technology it was easily disproven.
My bad and thanks for correcting and enlightning me :)
I disagree, a lot of nations became stable because of engineering solutions in the first place and also more scientifically literate. There is a ton of examples of this. The first telescope, as an example, thanks to Hans Lippershey and Galileo Galilei showed that the earth wasn't flat and removed some power from the church it also clearly made us see that the sun doesn't go around the earth so it showed that Copernicus was right all along. A big discovery that made people doubt the christian religion and change the political landscape forever.
All big scientific discoveries changed the societies in a big way and there is no going back. Scientific discoveries and technological innovation is the only thing that push a society forward.