That's a fair criticism, on geological timescales everything we have done that moved us ahead is on the order of an eyeblink and all of the past is the very long and extremely dark time before it. Democracy may not be a strong enough thing to be able to resist our technological progress, which then can result in falling back to a previous stage or some kind of lock-in effect for an undesirable future. It would be naive to expect things to continue as they are indefinitely.