In 1955, toward the end of his life, the mathematician John von Neumann wrote an essay called “Can We Survive Technology?” Foreshadowing the argument here, he believed that global society was “in a rapidly maturing crisis—a crisis attributable to the fact that the environment in which technological progress must occur has become both undersized and underorganized.” At the end of the essay, von Neumann puts survival as only “a possibility,” as well he might in the shadow of the mushroom cloud his own computer had made a reality.
