We took the low-hanging fruit, and by low-hanging I don't mean it was easy to do, just that the next steps are much harder. Preventing most viral disease deaths

We took the low-hanging fruit, and by low-hanging I don't mean it was easy to do, just that the next steps are much harder. Preventing most viral disease deaths, reducing the workload of laundry, energy, and food production, increasing the feasibility of sex without pregnancy, developing calculating machines and communication devices. Now the problems we have to solve imply deeper systemic issues and reversing our inner logic, such as consuming less or corralling vast pools of resources in a collective way to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Saving further labor time implies developing systems that can perform most complex tasks on their own that require humanlike cognition. In addition, the West is gradually losing its relative first mover bonus from industrialization and colonization, which results in a sense of hopelessness as the living standard corrects towards the mean. People nostalgic about the 1960's style of tech optimism are forgetting the global living situation from that time and the historical bubble those people lived in. People didn't have more rights and opportunities because tech was more optimistic, tech was more optimistic because the surplus was such that it granted additional possibilities for a short while.