> Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom

Thanks to colonialism, also in more modern form called globalism.

> Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.

Wealth has no intrinsic value, only relative one. You are only wealthy relatively to other members of the society. Doesn't matter if pharaohs had less comfortable lives than me. What matters is that a gap between pharaoh and a worker working on pyramids was way smaller than between Jeff Bezos and person working at the Amazon distribution center.

Also, most sweet fruits of progress that its prophets like to enumerate are not direct consequences of technological changes, but they came only after political struggle that has arisen exactly because the direct consequences were very dire for most people. If people pushing today for AI could decide on these things, they would be very happy to take away these hot meals from homeless people and let them starve to death.

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joe_mamba 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>Thanks to colonialism, also in more modern form called globalism.

You don't have to participate in globalism, you can be a hermit state that doesn't trade with the evil imperial capitalists, like Cuba and North Korea. Everyone wants to live there because the QoL is so good.

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wolvesechoes an hour ago | parent [-]

And it so good, because west extracted wealth and materials from all around the world places, and still extracts through globalisation.

QoL is so good here precisely because it is so poor out there.

	▲	joe_mamba an hour ago \| parent [-]
		>because west extracted wealth and materials from all around the world places If those "around the world places" had all the valuable resources that enabled modern civilisation when the west came and took them, why weren't they the ones to first make use of them to build computers, vaccines, MR machines and moon rockets, or at least clean drinking water and indoor sanitation facilities for their people? Or why didn't those "around the world places" then go and extract wealth and materials from the west instead? What stopped them? Surely it wasn't their moral values, since war, slavery and genocide even cannibalism, of their neighboring tribes and nations, was the norm of the day over there. >and still extracts through globalisation Correction: "pays for it through globalisation". That's how countries like India and China got so many people out of poverty after globalisation.