Where do innovations come from? What caused the industrial revolution? There's an argument to be made that greater freedoms in the UK after the abolition of the monarchy made the crucial inventions possible - and worthwhile.

I do not believe the UK even had a substantial slave population in the first place. Their choice to outlaw slavery was driven likely by the fact that it would continue easily in the USA, and would continue to benefit them. They were the manufactures at this point, and were sitting on large deposits of coal that allowed their industries to be free of rivers.

The US, meanwhile, was in full swing in terms of relying on slaves for their labor, and banning slavery would have had a tremendous impact on the south, and did. Consider that this is an accepted reason for why the US opposed ending slavery for so long, along with that the south, whose economy depended on slaves, thought slavery moral and right, while the north, which had industrialized like the UK, did not.

At the end of the day, slavery ended thanks to the fact that large areas did not need to rely on slaves anymore to get work done. If they still had to, they would not have banned it.

Societies where this begins to happen inevitably crumble long before this happens, or get abandoned, or changed. See the french revolution. See the potato famine in Ireland. People won't take shit lying down.

See china, see one of thousands of impoverished nations that rely on thousands of highly oppressed and disadvantaged workers. See the serf and nobles system. The shift would be over generations, not just a lifetime, and would be something you don't notice in your day to day life.

Rather than society being shaped by progress, it is society that is shaping progress

I'd say it is both/neither. Society is changing the things that effect it, and is causing itself to adapt to those changes itself. Like the body releasing a hormone, and then changing to adapt to it's presence.

If animals don't have to die anymore because of lab-grown meat, that's because we wanted to invent that alternative!

Oh, I agree entirely, and am a huge supporter of constant and well funded research and science to make the world a better place, but I do not see this as the equivalent to society doing what is right, only doing what is best.