I moved this out of the parent comment because I really want you to read the parent comment and was worried about the wall-of-text; hopefully, you'll be interes

I moved this out of the parent comment because I really want you to read the parent comment and was worried about the wall-of-text; hopefully, you'll be interested enough to read the continuation, too. it's not politicians who fed the world, it was Haber & Bosch Without diminishing their accomplishments, it's important to note that Haber & Bosch have come and gone but world hunger still isn't solved. And it will never be solved by technology alone. It's going to require politics, and economics, and unfortunately probably war. Hopefully technology can provide an important supporting role, but the realization that technology will only be providing a supporting role, that's exactly the humility I'm arguing for. Also, in what way were Haber & Bosch representative of "rich SV guys" or techie hubris? Maciej has never seemed to me to be criticizing mainstream scientific research at all. It wasn't environmentalists who saved whales from extinction, it was whoever invented that synthetic whale-oil substitute. ... Personally, I'm getting more and more convinced that social changes are caused by changes in technology landscape, not the other way around. Isn't synthetic whale-oil a clear counterexample to this causative claim? Surely you agree that research into whale-oil substitute was driven at least in part by environmentalism, it wasn't the invention of synthetic whale-oil substitute that incited people into caring about the environment. And again, in what way is the invention of whale-oil substitute representative of the hubris that Maciej is criticizing? we didn't have liberal democracy 500 years ago not because we were stupid then, but because technologies that can support it Didn't the Greeks have democracy 2500 years ago? The Roman Republic also had a form of democracy, which lasted longer than the US is old, our technology may well turn out not "support it" any better than theirs. This reminds me of a quote from a talk I read recently: More broadly, we have to stop treating computer technology as something unprecedented in human history. ... let's at least learn from our past, so we can fail in interesting new ways, instead of failing in the same exasperating ways as last time.