Technical progress without social progress is the standard road to dystopia. At best this is China. At worst it's Saudi Arabia: glittering cities of the mega-wealthy built by slaves.
You cannot say that something is "better" without considering how you're evaluating that and for whom it's better.
I object to the postmodern relativism embedded in your comment. "Better" can be universal in science and technology. Cleaner energy, faster processors, and less disease are not socially constructed forms of bullshit. These improvements are real.
Technical progress, in fact, is the only progress. Moral fashions comes and go, but we remember new scientific principles and how to apply them. Far too often, I see people try to slow the development of technology to suit the current moral fashion. That infuriates me: technology improves the human condition far more than moralizing ever has, and slowing technology development creates incomprehensible amounts of human misery.
How was the invention of chemical weapons "universally better"?
And where would you rather life: In a world with the technology of today, but the value system of 1438. Or in a world with today's system of law and human rights, but with the technology of 1438?
Any scheme that would have blocked chemical weapons research would also have blocked the green revolution. We're never worse off for having more basic knowledge about the universe. If you don't like chemical weapons, do something about people using them. Don't try to keep people ignorant.
Re dates: moral fads always look like moral progress from the inside. That doesn't make it so. I hope that our ancestors are kinder to us than we are to our own predecessors.
Yeah, now you're doing some sort of logical yoga, with an added dose of maybe-identured-servitude-was-actually-great-relativism.
Also, if I did "something about people using [chemical weapons]" wouldn't many of the things I would do qualify as useless non-technical progress? After all it's not technology that stops the US from dropping Sarin on ISIS, but the Chemical Weapons Convention.
You cannot say that something is "better" without considering how you're evaluating that and for whom it's better.