Working together for a tech is beautiful endeavour completely oppositie to a political movement.
You cannot say that something is "better" without considering how you're evaluating that and for whom it's better.
Technical progress, in fact, is the only progress. Moral fashions comes and go, but we remember new scientific principles and how to apply them. Far too often, I see people try to slow the development of technology to suit the current moral fashion. That infuriates me: technology improves the human condition far more than moralizing ever has, and slowing technology development creates incomprehensible amounts of human misery.
And where would you rather life: In a world with the technology of today, but the value system of 1438. Or in a world with today's system of law and human rights, but with the technology of 1438?
Re dates: moral fads always look like moral progress from the inside. That doesn't make it so. I hope that our ancestors are kinder to us than we are to our own predecessors.
Also, if I did "something about people using [chemical weapons]" wouldn't many of the things I would do qualify as useless non-technical progress? After all it's not technology that stops the US from dropping Sarin on ISIS, but the Chemical Weapons Convention.
There are enough people for everything. Some can do TP and others SP. If you are capable of doing TP then doing SP is inefficient use of resource.
There's time and need for both.