I think you bring up an interesting point. For those of us who are employed in the darling industry of our time, in the most liberal societies, who manage our money well, and are not related to anyone undesirable, this will not be a dystopia, it'll be paradise!

It would be beneficial to your friends and family, and probably your own quality of life, to start considering whether those who do not meet the above criteria should be subject to oppression, while those privileged by birth and wealth live in paradise.

That is until something you're doing becomes undesirable or threatening to the natural order and then it'll stop being paradise and become a hell you can't outrun.

Of course... that's always a risk. The government could turn the military machine on its own people and you'd end up there anyway.

We can live in fear, or we can cross that bridge if and when we come to it.

There is still plenty of time to for the invention of the transistor or the nuclear bomb to lead to ruin.

And the printing press. But that's unlikely.

I'm just trying to understand where this feeling of impending doom is coming from, and how it's being rationalized.

Books didn't keep track of you. A few transistors couldn't come close to approximate thinking. Nuclear bombs were a weapon of the last resort and may only end humanity, not enslave them.

But now our technology is becoming an approximation of the human mind. Our sensors are ever present, there is not even the illusion of privacy. Our algorithms get better everyday on predicting who you are and what you want, just by the friends you keep.

Was something different said by generations which prevented great leaps in technology?

Was the way in which the great leaps in technology happened unaffected by what those generations said?

How do you know that every other wave of technology wouldn't have led to dystopis if noone had said anything about it?