alt Hacker News> Social progress is literally the story of labor saving devices.
Historically it was not. They are two mostly unrelated things. Creating more with less labor can mean the richest getting richer while middle class becomes poor and poor become hopelessly poor.
> Creating more with less labor means a society of relative abundance, with more time for education, creativity, leisure and personal growth.
It never meant that, this is fairly tale. We got 40 hours workweek rather then 80 hours workweek because of political movements and fights, not because of technology. Labor saving device, on itself, leads to two outcomes: you work as much as before, but produce more (cue all the burned out overworked ai coders) or you get unemployed desperately looking for new work.
Political movements influenced how abundance was shared. They did not create that abundance.
Production and consumption are directly linked: societies can consume only what they produce. When individuals become more productive, society has more to consume. And indeed there is more. So much more. What you call a "fairy tale" is, thankfully, the world we live in.
When considering prosperity, it's important to emphasise what's real. So what if Warren Buffett owns a massive number of shares in notionally highly valued corporations? There are plenty of carrots available in the supermarket, and at an extraordinarily low prices by historical standards. Warren Buffett is not personally consuming some grotesquely disproportionate share of the carrots ... or pretty much any commodity which constitutes real material prosperity.