Technology multiplies our means, but a surplus of means is not by itself a better life.

Objects to

Grant the optimist his starting point: our means of acting, producing, communicating have grown as never before. But he at once concludes that our condition has improved, and it is that step which must be examined.
For a means is worth only the end it serves: having more tools makes life better only if those tools serve what makes life good. To multiply means without questioning ends is to gain in power, not necessarily in happiness or freedom.
And the very power that removes old ills gives rise to new ones: it creates needs we never had, dependencies, unprecedented forms of fatigue and solitude. The reckoning is thus not the simple addition the optimist assumes, and nothing guarantees it tips the right way for life itself.

Therefore So from the growth of our means one cannot conclude the progress of our condition: it is a leap from power to the good life that nothing secures.

Deepenings

Rousseau's suspicion

As early as the eighteenth century, argued, in his first discourse, that the progress of the sciences and arts had polished manners without making people better or happier: the first striking illustration of the gap between the advance of means and that of the condition.

Possible resolutions of the objection

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Challenges

The great lever