Smart folk aren't necessarily good folk. Where do you think all the increases in military tech comes from?
Most new tech starts in the military and then makes its way to the civilian market be it canned meat nukes or laser pointers.
It's just that way since the militaries tend to spend so much money on new stuff to 1 up their opponents.
I know, but military tech is generally geared toward killing folk faster (or slower, in the case of your own team) so it's kinda hard for me to be entirely onboard with the "technology will save us all!" wagon.
This kind of thinking pisses me off, because humanity basically never "solves" problems so much as they happen to outgrow them. Technology is usually the best way to do that, and the good stuff almost always outstrips the bad. Yes, we're better able to murder each other now than we were in medieval times, but we're also better at everything else, including having a high enough standard of life that we feel less inclined to murder each other. Same with every other drop in time/tech that's not on a major fall point; not many people would argue in good faith that, oh man, we never should have invented metallurgy because things were so much better with just wood and stone weapons. So why would you argue inventing whatever comes next won't make things better?
The obvious answer is something like "We need to become responsible enough to use what we have first" or similar, which makes me want to throw somebody into either a very high tech or very low tech gulag. We
still cannot stop stabbing each other with bits of metal, so the obvious takeaway would be, what, that we should have spent the past thousands and thousands of years without metal tools, waiting to mature enough to be trusted with them? Which, if it wasn't ridiculous enough in its own right, is counterproductive because the main reason we're any more mature now than we were then is
because metal tools have made us prosperous enough to mellow us all out.
Technology solves everything. I've never seen anybody refute this in retrospect (eg bows were a terrible invention, chariots ruined everything), only in contemporary or future alarm (eg holy shit we can do that, holy shit what do you mean even more destructive).