The relationship between technology and society is one filled with complexity. A statement like: "We had a problem with darkness so we invented electrical light

The relationship between technology and society is one filled with complexity. A statement like: "We had a problem with darkness so we invented electrical lighting", isn't representative of the real thing. If we think for example about the printing press it should be clear that there are certain forms of society that would make the invention of the printing press more likely — namely ones where books played a big role and literacy became more desireable. But on the other side the invention of the printing press had huge impacts on the societies that adopted them and branched them off into a totally different timeline. The relationship between a society and a technology is always dialectical: society changes technology and technology changes society. Part of our role as technologists is to be aware of that — if we care about where humanity is moving at all. Now if you jump back into the beginning of the last century a lot of the promises made by modernity were about automation making our lives easier. One could say: "We had hard labour so we invented automation" — only that the fruits of these automations haven't reached those whose jobs got replaced. Somebody working an average job 40 years ago could easily sustain a family. That is no longer possible. Technology got nothing to do with it, where the money flows does. A household appliance 40 years ago would last you decades. Today you are lucky if it lasts you 4 years. Technology, again, got nothing to do with it, where the money flows does. Endless growth works till you hit saturation. All growth requires external inputs in order to work. And in an finite world those inputs are finite as well. You can't put a mic into a loudspeaker and get infinite loudness because that would take infinite energy and all components in the circuit would have to be able to handle that. There is no free such thing as free lunch — also not with economic growth. There are many things that can look really great if you are good at selectively ignoring a big chunk of it's systemic in- and outputs or handwave them away.