Technology is all the tools. With a spade you got into a hole. With a ladder you'll climb out of it. Hopefully with treasure. Then that spade might help you fill the hole back in.

Particular technologies are highly intertwined - both directly and causally - so you can't really micromanage this. You have to push for technological develoment as a whole, and trim developments here, encourage there. For instance, we wouldn't be talking about renewable energy sources were it not for coal furnaces and internal combustion engines that allowed the world to progress to the point we even can exploit renewables. In this case not only we need the ladder because of the spade, but we also can have a ladder because of a spade.

I think that's what you need to realize. Technology is only one kind of tool in our toolbox for shaping humanity. Other tools include:

- Policy: With regards to technology, who's in charge, how we use it.

- Laws: How do we protect vulnerable (defenseless) people from the negative repercussions of technology.

- Philosophy: How we think about things, treat other humans, our environment.

And I'm saying all of this as a technophile. The same tool that got you into the hole is likely not the tool that will be useful for getting you out.

The tools you mention are also intertwined, with technology in particular being in the driver seat of changes in the other areas you mention. Therefore, it'll still be a necessary component of the solution, even if it won't be the only one.

I firmly disagree. While technology is certainly an enabler, either to implement the solution or to enforce it of a particular solution, it is not the tool from which the solution must be derived. The intertwining that you envision emerges when decision-making bodies look at a particular technology and decide how it should influence humanity.

Sure a spade can get you out of a hole, you can dig a ramp. And many hands make light work. Weak metaphor, really.

I think your argument too simplified to be applicable to reality. What would the ladder be in your analogy? A dramatic reduction in population and a return to pre-industrial subsistence farming?

Those are all policy solutions, and they come about when policy is used as a tool. I'm actually not advocating these particular solutions, just the use of policy as a tool, a different one, from technology.

Policies are usually feasible only as much as technology of the day allows it; try to go beyond what's technologically supported, and it'll either be impossible, or you'll have to force people at gunpoint.