"Playing God" is the point of all advancement. We're already doing it, and we'd better get good at it.
The problem is that we can "get good" at things but we have hard limits that are pathetic in comparison to the complexity of the universe. We are slightly advanced monkeys. We poke around at things and claim to understand them but time and again there are unintended consequences. This is hilarious to watch in the context of AI. Monkey invents machine based on high school mathematics. Monkey scales up the machine and pokes around at it but can't predict what it will do or even explain how it did it in retrospect.
I have more faith in ai overlords than I do in us sorting the incredible mess of human kind out.
We shouldn't do it, and we should stop and be happy with what we have and learn how to live better with what we have instead of inventing more trash like AI.
The Mayans didn't "temper their advancement with their limitations in terms of resources" - they were limited by available resources and time, therefore they did not advance as much and as fast as the others.
Advancement is driven by the basic need to make things better, whether for yourself or other. And it stacks.
Technology does make certain TASKS in life easier, but I'd argue that it's NOT a logical consequence that technology makes life BETTER.
Eugenicist may argue that this is not really a good thing, since it leads to a larger and larger fraction of the population having poor health, some of which will be hereditary.
1: Kaczynski’s term. Read his manifesto or even better the book Anti-Tech Revolution.
We don't know much about miserable medieval peasants, because they as a whole didn't know how to write, and the little the rare educated one wrote is unlikely to have been preserved. We know mostly what the rich or at least decently well off of the times have left, a lot of it biased or self-aggrandizing. Some of those wrote on things that they themselves didn't experience.
When you imagine happy peasants you should question who wrote on them and why, and if in those times there was any likelihood of anybody caring about the plight of suffering people, being allowed to write about it, and it being preserved to this day.
But besides that, even with the luck of having a life with a comfortable existence with work you enjoy, you still could one day die from something like an accident with a farm animal, a bad tooth, or childbirth.
That's a pretty broad claim. How far back is "the past" that was so much better? Which people did you have in mind? The Irish peasants starving because of potato blight? European villagers during the Black Death? The slaves building pyramids in ancient Egypt?