No question that living standards and wealth have risen over the past two centuries due to industrialization. Most of us couldn't have found a better time to be born.
The question is how long we can keep doing it - especially if we intend to keep growing our economies and population, say, 3% a year?
It's the energy that automation puts to work that is largely responsible for the growth of the past 200 years. And increasing automation and its resource and energy requirements, just like human labor and good old fashioned horsepower, are a limited resource. This is true for energy in agriculture (mechanization, fertilizers, transport) and energy in industrial and personal (transportation etc.) consumption. As just an esoteric high tech automation example, just the cost of electricity to "mine" one Bitcoin is now around $6,000. And that's at 4 cents per KwH. My power cost is 5x that, even with solar.
We're beginning to see the limits of everything from phosphates for fertilizers to topsoil, favorable climate, fossil fuels, clean water, fish stocks, the right sand for concrete, rare earth metals for batteries, etc. Even as far back as the 1970's momentary disruption of oil caused a deep recession. Now that we have billion plus people economies (China, India, maybe the Arab world and Africa) determined to power their way to the top we'll be placing heavier demands on not-so-infinite resources. It's a recipe for conflict and maybe collapse.
It's a gnarly problem - people are thinking about it but don't yet really have solid answers:
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/electric-power-and-natural-gas/our-insights/the-decoupling-of-gdp-and-energy-growth-a-ceo-guide
Might add that economists and politicians of all persuasions think the solution is to keep growing the economy and (generally) to keep growing the population. As some point, the math simply doesn't work out.
