[epups]

The article is a quite interesting read, but it paints everything strongly with intellectual doomerism colors.

> But today it is hard not to feel that if we have been, in fact, changing the world, we have been changing it for the worse.

Really? By what metric? Similar statements are made about the tech sector, which the author equates to social media and Tesla apparently, ignoring the immense value the Internet alone has provided worldwide in the last decades.

[adrienthebo]

    - Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels
    - Oceanic temperatures and pH
    - Quantities in PFAS in the environment
    - Opiate deaths (and other deaths of despair) per capita
    - Percentage of children and teenagers with depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation or have attempted suicide
    - Per-capita income in Africa and South America over the last two decades
    - School shootings per capita and firearms related deaths in children within America

The Internet is pretty rad, we've improved a number of health outcomes for a number of communities, and we're closing to making humanity a truly space-faring species; but for every statistic we can provide indicating progress there's usually a handful of related numbers that paint a grimmer picture.

[epups]

Climate change is an interesting example, because we are obviously making things worse for climate overall for centuries. However, our rate of improvement is dramatically increasing.

The other examples you provide are local. I don't think that everything is improving everywhere obviously, that would be ludicrous. But if you broaden your metrics a bit more fairly - gdp per capita globally, child mortality and life expectancy - our improvement is significant.