Public debate increasingly casts technology as a threat — to jobs, to equality, even to civilisation itself. In this article, environmental activist Zion Lights challenges that narrative, showing that every major improvement in human wellbeing, from rising life expectancy to declining famine, has its roots in technological advance rather than moral evolution or political reform. Tracing developments from mechanised agriculture to AI-driven healthcare, Lights argues that technological innovation has quietly saved more lives than any social programme. Drawing on global evidence, it reveals why resisting technology out of fear risks entrenching the very poverty and vulnerability we seek to avoid.

Without technology, we’d still be living in poverty

Cultural memory is selective. We romanticize earlier centuries as if comfort, stability, and abundance were their default conditions. We inhabit the best-documented improvement in human wellbeing the world has ever seen, yet we are haunted by nostalgia for eras defined by scarcity and precarity. There is even a term for yearning for ages that we’ve never lived in—anemoia—which reflects a deep refusal to recognize that the best timeline is the one we inhabit now. Yet longing for imagined pasts obscures an important truth: agriculture, education, medicine, and global living standards have been transformed through technological advancement and innovation, and much of it in our lifetimes.

Across every essential domain of human survival, from food to knowledge to health, the modern world has broken patterns that endured for thousands of years, and the agent of that break is not moral enlightenment alone, but technology—the single force that has ever truly displaced poverty. Thanks to technological advancements, today is the best timeline humanity has ever occupied, and the evidence for this is overwhelming, whether we look at agriculture, education, healthcare, or almost any other measure of human wellbeing.

The blunt truth is that for most of human history, poverty was not an anomaly but the baseline condition of existence. Famine, disease, illiteracy, and deprivation were inescapable realities for the vast majority of people. Even the wealthiest societies of the past struggled to secure the basic necessities of life for most of their people. However privileged their elites may appear in hindsight, they lived with the same fundamental vulnerabilities as everyone else: food that spoiled without refrigeration, diseases that spread without vaccines, and injuries or infections that could turn fatal for lack of even the most elementary medical technologies. Material comfort did not insulate them from biological reality, and no amount of social hierarchy or political organization could compensate for the absence of the technologies that now make ordinary life safer than even royalty once experienced.

The world we grow

Let’s begin with agriculture. From the moment humans abandoned nomadic life and settled in order to grow food, the struggle to meet even basic calorie requirements has been a defining feature of our existence. For thousands of years, harvests rose and fell with the weather, famine shadowed every failed season, and entire civilizations could be undone by a single drought or blight. Stability was the promise of agriculture, but scarcity remained its constant companion.

Then came mechanization. Before this, farming was intensely laborious and yields were vulnerable to environmental fluctuations. Famines were frequent, and the labour of entire families barely sufficed to feed themselves. The introduction of mechanized plows, irrigation systems, and chemical fertilisers transformed the capacity of human labour. Agricultural productivity increased exponentially, food became cheaper and more reliable, and famine receded as a regular threat. These technological advances redefined the conditions of human survival.

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