I agree it's not perfect, but I think you are over-dramatizing.

My gut says that planetary healthy would be wildly improved if we worked to build a more efficient society. Having meaning & caring about being a well running world would hopefully give us some grounds to flourish on, pride and effort and will to drive us towards something meaningful, beyond the grab-as-much-money-as-you-can state of things today. A collective future worth caring about.

The article talks about building a social world for people deliberately. It seems like they had some care, wanted to try to improve the social lives of people too. If anything I think the Technocracy people understood somewhat better that these decisions about how we treat people are not instanteous questions: maybe we get more social productivity out of some by treating them like crap & working them to collapse, but then we have decades of them being a social and perhaps economic drain on all society. That short term exploitation is what capital does to people today already! But no scientist worth a salt is going to create such imbalanced wasteful systems!

Efficiency can mean a lot of different things. It depends on what you are trying to make efficient, doesn't it? An efficient society, in my view, would be focused on happiness indexes, on gini coefficients. It would be trying to make our footprint more modest, try to make goods repairiable & sustainable long term. Modern eco-concern today has a lot of overlap with many of the basics here.

I'm speculating a lot. But if you don't want to nibble at this food for thought what other morsels are worth trying? This very much is a case where, again, I find the anti-willpower striking and concerning, the leaping into the negative. Over something strange and weird and a bit fanciful and naive. But at least they were working for something to believe in. At least they had a will to better, one that seems fundamentally resoundingly kind of true, kind of needed: a view that is long term, that focuses on building a maintainable long term running order, that doesn't consume until exhaustion.