If one goes back three hundred years, then it is easier to see what genuine progress is, starting from the Industrial Revolution. And when one considers what it has replaced, it is all the more difficult to consider the majority of it as progress, let alone the useful point of it.
In real terms, industry has not produced true progress, but served instead to reduce the impact of the agricultural hand to mouth style of living upon the body - reducing hunger, illness and deprivation and in its wake causing overpopulation, without the ability to cope with it fairly. (Numerically, the world could support more people but the land mass and cultivation is no longer present).
There never was any hope of bringing the world crisis since Adam further than the six thousand years given it. This is why the situation has now reached its conclusion. The Industrial Revolution is second only to the flood in its purpose and outcome. It has brought us to where we are now and the means to achieve its own destruction in a rather beautiful arrangement of self judgement under the governance of mankind. There is a certain majesty to its self denunciation in the admission of guilt and complicity in the denial of purpose that Jehovah had planned for this world, and thus the magnifying of righteous judgement upon it by Jehovah when He does bring it to its end. We have brought it upon ourselves. It’s not something to get depressed about, but to rejoice over in its coming destruction and sterility in its purpose - to be replaced by what was at first intended. We can well do without further “progress” now. It’s time to enjoy a bit of peace and quiet before the storm.