I wondered about that too, and I think your parents may have a point.
We humans have been into space, we landed on the moon, we built computers that destroy humans at chess, we have the entire Internet in our pocket, we have Avatar in the cinema and Crysis on our computers, we read genes, we created synthetic life, we print transplantable bladders and blood vessels, we have self-driving cars, and we mass-produce transistors just 220 hydrogen atoms wide -- but so what?
People died of cancer in 1960, and they still do.
Drunk drivers ran over people in 1960, and they still do.
There was violent crime in 1960, and it's still here.
Politicians were inefficient and corrupt in 1960, and they still are.
To normal people (like your parents and many of my normal friends), an ordinary human life essentially remains the same no matter how drastically human technology improves. Birth, childhood (good or bad), school with friendships and bullies, marriage, nine-to-five job, retirement, grandchildren, death.
Perhaps this is what's going on with your parents -- and with a lot of my "normal" friends and coworkers.
But a cancer diagnosis means expensive treatment then more years of life, not near-certain death.
But there are fewer car accidents now (depending on where you are), and driverless cars might change that.
But there's much less crime now.
But revolutions spread like whoa now, because the media's fast.
Also, your scale is tiny. There were very few deaths by cancer when lifespans were short in the days before farming. There were no drunk drivers in 1800. There were no corrupt politicians in bands of < 150 people. There was no school for most people in 800. There were no 9-to-5 jobs in 1900 when we were all farmers. Long enough to explain a mistake, not to prove a point.
When attempting to introduce non-rationalists to the ideas of cryonics or Strong AI, it appears that their primary objections tend to be rooted in the absurdity heuristic. They don't believe they inhabit a universe where such weird technologies could actually work. To deal with this, I thought it would be useful to have a cache of examples of technologies that have actually been implemented that did, or ideally, still do, challenge our intuitions about the way the universe works.
The first example that comes to my mind is computers in general; imagine what Ernest Rutherford, let alone Benjamin Franklin, would have thought of a machine that uses electricity to calculate, and do those calculations so fast that they can express nearly anything as calculations. Nothing we know about how the universe works says it shouldn't be possible, indeed it obviously is knowing what we do now, but imagine how weird this would have seemed back when we were just coming to grips with how electricity actually worked.
I suspect there may be better examples to challenge the intuitions of people who've grown up in an age where computers are commonplace though. So does anyone have any to volunteer?