The answer, after even the most perfunctory examination, is that it is does. Sometimes the real world is actually more simple than the variegated universes of our philosophical imaginations.
^^^^ CB: More than a perfunctory examination might show that the answer is not quite so definite. For one thing, improve the lot as contrasted with when ? The lives of Indigenous Americans were not nasty , brutish and short, as bourgeois myth would have it. Carrol's example of the well connected community might suggest to u to examine just how good the lot of the great mass was in various societies with low tech, kin based societies, primary communist societies. Then there's the issue of pollution from industrial technology, which puts a few debits on the modern technology side of the ledger of comparison. And there's the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation that mass misery is constantly engendered by the capitalist accumulation process by way of creation of the relative surplus population. A poor person with car (with GPS), tv, cellphone , computer, central heating , running water, electrified house, access to health care, etc, can be more miserable than a peasant in the boondocks of Asia living in a hut because the peasant has simpler wants and needs and thereby satisfies them easier. By creating so many more wants/needs capitalism makes it more difficult to satisfy people. "There are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little." ( http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm)
Happiness is a level of match between wants/needs and means of consumption not strictly correlated with the absolute amount and complex nature of stuff had in hand.
However, we aren't going back to a previous mode of production anyway, so assume what u say is correct regarding technology as the key to progress in improving the lot of the many. The part of the left that bases itself on Marx and Engels' system of ideas might say "hey wait a minute. have u read the pean to the progress got by capitalism in _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_, technologcial progress. "The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. " ..."The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society".. "what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? " Partisans of the working class are not anti-technology and do see pro-technological development as the basis for improving the lot of the masses. I think the issue is "Why not the best ? " We can do even better at integrating and distributing the use-values of the modern technological regime than capitalism has so as to optimize ( greatest good for greatest number utilitarianist socialism , smiles) the improvement of the lot of the lot, the happiness of a lot more.
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I do get the impression that some on the left resent the idea that the working class could possibly achieve a greater degree of happiness without having installed a regime in it's own name. The implication to me is that most people are really more interested in their own particular political means than they are in the ends. As for me, I try as best as I feebly can, to focus upon the ends, political implications be damned. The test of right and left, capitalist and proletarian is how far they advance the lot of mankind. Nothing else in the end matters, not urbane obscurity on a mailing list, not political correctness, and not heroic contrariness