TLDR: Always look on the bright side of life...
The problem with technological changes that help the world as a whole, is that they usually do so at the cost of human suffering.
At the beginning of the industrial revolution, textiles were largely made by hand, which required a lot of labor -- but it also employed a lot of people. When automation took over, it allowed a few hundred people in a factory to do the job of thousands. Unfortunately, it took a long time for the thousands to find other jobs -- many of them didn't survive the process, dying in poverty. More were forced to move to cities, which wasn't a picnic for them or the existing residents.
Technology can change quickly, but societies usually lag behind.
The technological singularity was named after the mathematical concept that defines a black hole -- beyond a certain point you can't know what happens because information can't come back through. By the same token, humans can't plan for what will happen after the singularity. We know that our society will have to change, but we don't know how. We may not even be capable of understanding the issues.
Of course, we might be able to do a better job with artificial intelligence guiding us, but so far AI (for whatever reason) has only a casual relationship with reality. Researchers often go through many systems before they manage to make one that gives the right result. How do you do that, when you aren't smart enough as a species to tell if you're getting the right result or not?
And to complicate matters, technological changes occur at an ever-increasing rate, which means our societies have less and less time to respond to them. When I went to college, I was only expected to learn one trade, for the rest of my life. Now, you have to assume you'll need constant retraining, which is expensive even if you can handle it.
Societies could change in response to technology when people didn't live long enough to retard the process. Children who grew up in the new conditions would adapt. What happens when two or three (or more) major changes occur in the space of one generation? People aren't wired to handle that, because they've never had to be.
How fast can you get people to support new laws and new ideas? What happens when the next major change happens faster than that?
I'm a realist. I don't believe in pinning my hopes on the supernatural or on unproven qualities of technology. I don't expect "someone" (human or otherwise) to come up with an answer before it's too late. That's why I can't always manage a zen acceptance about these things. The usual response by optimists is that we've always found a way through every major problem before. That works... right up to the point when we don't.
The Drake equation has a lot of hard to calculate factors, but one of them is how long civilizations last. If they last a long time, we should be up to our armpits in visitors... but we're not. Maybe the problems technology creates are too much for any species to deal with.
The one thing that comforts me about all of this, is that the universe has only existed for a tiny fraction of it's expected lifespan (literally: the time life can exist in it). If humans don't manage to figure things out, someone probably will... eventually.
