Collectively, sure. How did that go for the people who's livelihoods got replaced though? I've had family members be forced to change careers from white-collar work after being laid off and unable to find engineering jobs due to people decades younger taking them all nearby. I saw firsthand the unbelievable amount of stress and depression they went through, and it took them years to accept that their previous life and career were gone.

"It'll massively suck for you, but don't worry, it'll be better for everyone else" is little comfort for most of us

Especially when promises and plans to use some of those windfalls of progress to help those harmed by it, seem never to see much follow-through.

Progress is cool if you're on the side of the wheel that's going up. It's the worst fucking thing in the world if you're on the side that's going down and are about to get smashed into the mud.

> Especially when promises and plans to use some of those windfalls of progress to help those harmed by it, seem never to see much follow-through.

The poor are economically better off than at almost any point in history; actual food poverty is almost unknown, objectively people are living in better houses than ever before, and so on. It just doesn't seem like any of that makes poor people any happier or poverty any less wretched, somehow.

I don't mean the poor, broadly, I mean people who were doing OK, but then aren't, after some major advance in technology or some change in economic policy. For the older ones, especially, "here's some money to retrain" (which they might get if they're lucky) doesn't compensate them for the harm they're suffering so that the overall pie, if you will, can grow.

For people caught in that kind of situation, progress sucks.

Well, most of us are in the benefiting group so I'd definitely take that gamble.

But you're off course right that the benefits are unevenly distributed, and for some it truly does suck.

This is absolutely a problem, but it's also very clear that, as a problem, it has nothing to do with the technology, and everything with the society. If we are wary of new tech that improves productivity because someone might starve as a result of its deployment, that alone shows just how fucked up things are.

"It hasn't happened in the past, therefore it won't happen in the future" is simply just a fallacy.