Although you don’t explicitly mention it, I feel like this whole post is about value drift. The doomers are generally right on the facts (and often on the causal pathways), and we do nonetheless consider the post-doom world better, but the 1-nth order effects of these new technologies reciprocally change our preferences and worldviews to favor the (doomed?) world created by the aforementioned new technologies.
The question of value drift is especially strange given that we have a “meta-intuition” that moral/social values evolving and changing is good in human history. BUT, at the same time, we know from historical precedent that we ourselves will not approve of the value changes. One might attempt to square the circle here by arguing that perhaps if we were, hypothetically, able to see and evaluate future changed values, that we would in reflective equilibrium accept these new values. Sadly, from what I can gather this is just not borne out by the social science: when it comes to questions of value drift, society advances by the deaths of the old-value-havers and the maturation of a next generation with “new” values.
For a concrete example, consider that most Americans have historically been Christians. In fact, the history of the early United States is deeply influenced by Christianity, sometimes swelling in certain periods to fanatical levels. If those Americans could see the secular American republic of 2025, with little religious belief and no respect for the moral authority of Christian scripture, they would most likely be morally appalled. Perhaps they might view the loss of “traditional God-fearing values” as a harm that in itself outweighs the cumulative benefits of industrial modernity. As a certain Nazarene said: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36)
With this in mind, as a final exercise I’d like you, dear reader, to imagine a future where humanity has advanced enormously technologically, but has undergone such profound value shifts that every central moral and social principle that you hold dear has been abandoned, replaced with mores which you find alien and abhorrent. In this scenario, do you obey your moral intuitions that the future is one of Lovecraftian horror? Or do you obey your historical meta-intuitions that future people probably know better than you do?
I agree with your sentiment — I suppose I was implicitly presenting the bull case (or paradigmatic case) of cultural drift, wherein the future values are supported by future people but despised by their ancestors.
I think your example is closer to the familiar “Moloch” dynamic, where social and material technology leads to collective outcomes that are obviously undesirable to all involved. Moloch is certain to be an possible issue in any future world!