All true, and we also need to consider the enormous societal costs to all this innovation. We truly are not happier, we have “simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation,” and we are rapidly trashing the planet to uninhabitability. This paragraph in particular seems to miss the point of the current historic moment: “Consider past marvels. Could we have moved goods as easily or as quickly without modern earthmoving equipment letting us bore tunnels through mountains or under cities? This superpower of humans + machines made it possible to build cities housing tens of millions of people, for a tiny fraction of our people to work producing the food that all the rest of us eat.” The corollary externalities to all this “progress” include toxic chemicals in our water, mass extinction, and a terrifyingly warming planet.

Now I’m no Luddite, but I believe it’s time for a radical change in how we think and talk about things like progress and economic value, and I hope you, as one of our leading public thinkers and a clear humanist, will consider ways to route the discourse around what has become an extremely dangerous place.