Is 'Progress' Good for Humanity?
Progress with a protective or safeguarding cut-off point certainly could be. But impossible to successfully curate; just another form of "do-gooder" authoritarianism that would eventually be overthrown or undermined.
So the answer is no, since open-ended progress ultimately means the retirement or passing of humanity, even if classic, stereotypical apocalyptic events are avoided.[1]
But for the development of "life" and "intelligence" overall, progress is good from the standpoint of liberation from a single home world and distribution across the galaxy.
The latter could even consist of nothing more than semi-intelligent, nomadic technological "wildlife" populating outer space, and it would still be better than the long legacy of self-replicating systems evolving on Earth being obliterated when the dying Sun expands into a red giant.
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[1] Barring the transapient species of the future maintaining pockets of baseline mortals as nostalgic amusements in either corporeal sequestered environments or in simulated realities. In which case, it might not be beneficial to be the "pets" of engineered gods, since there's no guarantee of moral-like empathy from beings at the high end of the toposophic scale.
Speaking retrospectively, there might be lots of reasons for dissing the original Abrahmaic God, but doing so because of _X_ being construed as a cruel or apathetic sphincter is not one of them. Few things are more ludicrous than expecting person-like ethical sentiments from a transapient entity (whether supernatural or technological). One might introduce a hybrid mediator between the two (akin to the role of Jesus), but the "singularity" lurking behind the dumbed-down facade is still an aloof process of calculating principle and unfathomable goals, that you don't want to be messing with or lecturing to.
