David F. Noble's "The Religion of Technology" is a good read to understand how this whole tenet of "salvation by technology" has been a thing for a very long time...
It's hard to understate what a miracle it is. Kings could afford to eat meat more than once a day but couldn't get (say) blood pressure medication or antibiotics.
Most of us are a few generations from subsistence agriculture, but ecology tells us that if we don't solve all the problems in front of us [1] we are a few generations from a much smaller population that does subsistence agriculture at best.
