The other day, embarking exhaustedly from a nine-hour transatlantic flight, I said to my wife: "They really need to hurry up and invent teleportation - what's t

The other day, embarking exhaustedly from a nine-hour transatlantic flight, I said to my wife: "They really need to hurry up and invent teleportation - what's taking them so long?". She replied tiredly: "I hope they won't. Once we have a way to get to work instantly, I'll have to work even longer hours"... I feel this sort of fatalism is rather pervasive. I'm a huge fan of 1950s technology ads, showing housewifes kicking back with a cocktail inside the airconditioned glass bubble on top of their lawnmower. But this promise of technology to improve your quality of life and to let machines do your work while you relax has largely been replaced by a promise to let you do more work, consume more content and improve your overall efficiency. There's a weird conflict here. We can empirically prove that life has gotten meaningfully better on a large number of metrics (the Steven Pinker message) - but our perceived reality has been heading downhill for decades, and there is a pervasive sense that every additional technology accelerates this process.