"What I fear most is that we will lack the will and the foresight to face the world's problems squarely, but will instead retreat from them into superstition and ignorance...
We may find technological solutions that propel us into a new golden age of robots, collective intelligence, and an economy built around 'the creative class.' But it's at least as probable that as we fail to find those solutions quickly enough, the world falls into apathy, disbelief in science and progress, and after a melancholy decline, a new dark age...
Now consider how conservative elements in American religion and politics refuse to accept scientific knowledge, deride their opponents for being "reality based," and ask yourself, 'could that ideology come to rule the most powerful nation on earth? and if it did, what would be the consequences for the world'?
Civilizations do fail. We have never yet seen one that hasn't. The difference is that the torch of progress has in the past always passed to another region of the world. But we've now, for the first time, got a single global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together."