Progress is almost never linear. Ups and downs and bursts. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.

Of course, the Genetically Modified Mosquito project has gone wrong, with, really, "unforeseen outcomes". When will IYIs learn that we don't understand complex systems enough to play with them? Or when will we learn that science is not scientism?

The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.