Relatively speaking, it’s the best it has ever been in the history of humanity.
Of course it’s hard to measure happiness and we’ll never be perfect but we have greater safety, lower violence, more food, more work, etc etc.
I wonder if people had succeeded in stopping the tractor because it displaced workers.
Of course it displaced workers. Workers who now do more valuable work. Or even less work altogether.
100 years ago, retirement was very rare. Now people retire and live 10-30 years without work.
Robots and automation will help this trend, not hurt it.
Of course as a programmer I’ve been making myself obsolete for decades and just moving onto cooler problems. Only stupid programmers worry about “job safety” and creating brittle software that requires them to be around forever.