I agree with that. IMO a question that's worth asking (and I haven't found a good treatment of it) is: to what end? And, I don't mean anything about right or wrong, or good or bad for the human spirit, or even good or bad for us as a species.

Speaking from a physical standpoint, we seem to time and time again work to lower the energy state of some aspect of living, but I am not sure what that is. Or maybe we aren't getting to lower energy states at all, but we are caught in some sort of behavioral eddy, just going around and around... For example, we make something that saves time, so we get busier doing something else, and then we find ways to do that faster, so we get busier doing something else...

I've been incubating this half-baked theory that consciousness is anxiety based on environmental challenges, and that our technological efforts are motivated to minimize this anxiety, but I'm not so sure. I'm starting to think that progress is actually something else entirely. Maybe something that is not changing us at all. It's simply satisfying an urge that earned us an evolutionary advantage, but nothing more.