I am optimistic about the future but I doubt happiness would increase so much; happiness is remarkably stable; I do think at the right time scale, humans as a group will have less sickness and brutality and more kindness and intelligence and fulfillment. But you know people in a society with 1/3 of children dieing within five years are remarkably not unhappier than one where only 0.2% die.

The right scale is not years or decades but maybe centuries. I recently read the powerhouse book “Pandemic” by Sonia Shah, among whose amazing ideas is a history of the ideas of medicine and germ theory in the last few hundred years. As idiotic as the Covid responses have been, they were way way better, not only than the European response to Plague, but to European response to cholera from 170 years ago. We are as a group slow learners, but seem to continue handling each recurrent example of a problem slightly better; our Achilles heel is slow moving disasters than just happen once, e.g. the carbon burn.

(Offtopic, another fascinating idea from the book is that both sexual reproduction and death or individuals may be evolved responses to microbial attacks, mixing up the variety in the species so the microbes can’t over adapt to the genome).