Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever encountered before, such as superintelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that can manipulate your emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms, and the need to change your profession every decade.

It is perhaps the strongest form of secular faith that collective human ingenuity will continue to overcome limits. Many people today feel a level of techno-optimism that ‘something will come along’ to extract humanity from the progress traps it has set for itself. Yet it is clear that human systems are failing on many different levels, in some way