Matt Ridley wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010 about humanity’s material and intellectual progress. Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now was published in 2018 with some similar observations.
Does technological progress destabilize collective security? What happens when an advanced technology is wielded by, after removing the veneer of modern socialization and civilization, a stone age temperament and sensibility?
And this all leaves to one side questions about how urbanization might facilitate the spread of new or newly encountered pathogens.
Perhaps technology really is about society collectively remedying its last disaster: eventually farming came to society’s rescue after the last mastodon was killed. Your views?
I'm sorry I don't understand the connection between prosperity and security. An individual certainly feels more secure having greater wealth but is it applicable to the whole of humanity? What could reduce the sense of insecurity that mankind feels will be a kind of explicit or unspoken consensus among the nations of the world to resolve their differences through peaceful means, a collective resolution to alleviate the poverty and hunger of the less fortunate people and an ironclad resolution to stop harming the environment any more.
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