I'm a t1 diabetic; I of course share your feelings on progress. That said, I'm unconvinced that technological progress is necessarily dependent on long work weeks (to start, most people working long weeks are totally uninvolved with this sort of innovation).
Sure, but at least over medium to long periods of recent history there is a pretty direct relationship between work and economic productivity (productivity which is required to have the resources to do things like training doctors and building hospitals).
It's also not true that labor is uninvolved with technology. If people are busy with the hum drum details of survival they have less time to try new ideas and the like.
