But while progress strong enough to destroy the world is indeed modern, the devil of scale who transforms benefits
into traps has plagued us since the Stone Age. This devil lives within us and gets out whenever we steal a march on nature, tipping the balance between cleverness and recklessness, between need and greed.
Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 - by driving a whole herd over a cliff - had made too much. They lived high for a while, then starved.
This idea serves as the underlying premise for the book: moral, responsible progress is healthy, unethical, reckless destruction under the guise of "progress" may end the great human experiment.
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