Megan J. McArdle

But my retort is that that doesn't work.

The same industrial revolution that led to global warming has also made us so rich that we could afford to divert millions of workers from agriculture and weaving into science and medicine.

It's giving us the tools to fight ecological disaster.

But we couldn't have predicted any of that from the outset.

We kind of had to live the change in order to understand what it meant.

Now, actually, it's worse than that.

Because it's often quite easy to picture the near-term downsides.

I mean, just read any article about AI.

But the long-term upside is much harder to grasp, because progress is cumulative.

And the longer it accumulates, the weirder it gets.

So a final thought experiment.

Imagine trying to explain your life right now to a Luddite.

Better yet, just imagine trying to explain the life of some ordinary British working-class stiff whose great-great-great-something-great-grandfather was out there smashing machines.

And I'm not just talking about the ordinary stuff about daily living standards, like indoor plumbing.

I mean, indoor plumbing is extremely awesome, but imagine trying to explain mass post-secondary education or the BBC, nursing homes or bachelorette weekends.

I mean, for that matter, weekends and standardized time.

How about suburbs and pizza delivery?

and a nation so rich that when a pandemic strikes, people can afford to wait that out at home while scientists, like, what is a scientist, says the Luddite, while scientists rush out a magic shot that helps keep people from dying.

To a Luddite, that would have sounded like a fairytale, and he'd be right.

We are living in fairyland, and indeed, we all have magic wands in our pockets."