Innovations created in developed economies do not deprive less-developed economies of anything. More to the point, less-developed economies eventually get access to these innovations, and get them at prices that are cheaper than the prevailing prices in developed economies.
Drugs are a good example of this dynamic. Many of us consider new drug prices to be a scandal (although maybe we shouldn’t) requiring government action. But the thing about new drugs is that they eventually become old drugs, and they still work just as well. And old drugs, by and large, become cheap and affordable drugs. See this post for a few examples.
Although it seems unfair that less-developed economies have to wait to get the newest innovations, that wait is far shorter than the wait they would endure if required to develop these innovations for themselves.
That all seems logical, at least to me, but of course human happiness is not governed by the rules of logic. The conflict of logically-expected vs actually-perceived happiness is embodied in the Esterlin Paradox: that happiness varies directly with income both among and within nations, but over time happiness does not trend upward as income continues to grow.
Here’s the relationship between happiness and national income:
And here is the (lack of) relationship between income and happiness over time:
From Why are national happiness levels always flat?
The usual proposed resolution of this paradox is that the happiness of humans is driven by perceived relativeincome rather than by absolute levels of income. Even if I am better off than before, I feel worse off if my neighbor’s income has grown more than mine.
One of the main effects of innovation is to make everyone our neighbor. People actually make a living on Instagram and YouTube showing off all the great stuff which they have and you don’t. Why people willingly torment themselves in this manner is a question I can’t begin to answer.
Less-developed economies do receive the benefits (and ills) associated with new technologies—they just receive them later. To the extent that this is a problem, it is a problem of human psychology, rather than one of technology itself, or of economics. I’m not sure how we solve it, or if it is even a problem worth solving.