> As I read Pinker, I sometimes imagined a book published in 1923 about the astonishing improvements in the condition of Europe’s Jews following their emancipation. Such a book might argue: look, obviously past results don’t guarantee future returns; all this progress could be wiped out by some freak future event. But for that to happen, an insane number of things would need to go wrong simultaneously: not just one European country but pretty much all of them would need to be taken over by antisemitic lunatics who were somehow also hyper-competent, and who wouldn’t just harass a few Jews here and there until the lunatics lost power, but would systematically hunt down and exterminate all of them with an efficiency the world had never before seen. Also, for some reason the Jews would need to be unable to escape to Palestine or the US or anywhere else. So the sane, sober prediction is that things will just continue to improve, of course with occasional hiccups (but problems are solvable).

> Or I thought back to just a few years ago, to the wise people who explained that, sure, for the United States to fall under the control of a racist megalomaniac like Trump would be a catastrophe beyond imagining. Were such a comic-book absurdity realized, there’d be no point even discussing “how to get democracy back on track”; it would already have suffered its extinction-level event. But the good news is that it will never happen, because the voters won’t allow it: a white nationalist authoritarian could never even get nominated, and if he did, he’d lose in a landslide. What did Pat Buchanan get, less than 1% of the vote?

But the Nazi's were defeated, anti-Semitism isn't solved but still way less than it used to be, and US citizens are actively fighting Trump & Co.

I share the feeling that at some point, we're going to see a mass genocide thanks to either CRISPR-based targeted viruses or hard-to-stop drones being much too easy to weaponise by a single nutcase. The world is always resource constrained, and technologies do enable ever more efficient ways of killing ourselves. These are real things to worry about.

But the WWII and Trump examples came about because of a different reason: mass communication. What seems to be missing from Aaronson's review at the societal level, is the insight from Clay Shirky into what enabled both of these things to happen:

> So, what happens when a medium suddenly puts a lot of new ideas into circulation? (...) When the telegraph came along, it was clear that it was going to globalize the news industry. What would this lead to? Well, obviously, it would lead to world peace. The television, a medium that allowed us not just to hear but see, literally see, what was going on elsewhere in the world, what would this lead to? World peace. (Laughter) The telephone? You guessed it: world peace. Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no world peace. Not yet.

> Even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe. Instead, what we got was Martin Luther's 95 Theses, the Protestant Reformation, and, you know, the Thirty Years' War. All right, so what all of these predictions of world peace got right is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly come into circulation, it changes society. What they got exactly wrong was what happens next.

Shirky then continues to discuss that he believes that the reason we stil think of these technologies as good is because it effectively forced us to become better at arguing. His example is that it enabled things like the scientific revolution[0].

I have yet to read Pinker's newest book, or Better Angels for that matter, so perhaps he addresses these aspect too. I expect him to since he discusses one aspect of this in his earlier language-oriented work: mutual knowledge. Better communication means an improvement in mutual knowledge. And if there is a lot of trauma, resentment and injustice in society, an increase in mutual knowledge brings instability[1]. For example, Shirky's does not explicitly mention what the flaw in the reasoning of the Catholic Church was: it was oblivious or ignorant to the huge injustices in their system. The current craziness is coming about because the existing structures turn out not to be working out so well, and need to be changed. But that will be hard and messy process.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU&t=7m40s