My father used to say that if the present system had been in place a hundred years ago, automobiles would have been outlawed to protect the saddle industry.

One of my major childhood influences was reading Jerry Pournelle's A Step Farther Out, at the age of nine. It was Pournelle's reply to Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, who were saying, in the 1960s and 1970s, that the Earth was running out of resources and massive famines were only years away. It was a reply to Jeremy Rifkin's so-called fourth law of thermodynamics; it was a reply to all the people scared of nuclear power and trying to regulate it into oblivion.

I grew up in a world where the lines of demarcation between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys were pretty clear; not an apocalyptic final battle, but a battle that had to be fought over and over again, a battle where you could see the historical echoes going back to the Industrial Revolution, and where you could assemble the historical evidence about the actual outcomes.

On one side were the scientists and engineers who'd driven all the standard-of-living increases since the Dark Ages, whose work supported luxuries like democracy, an educated populace, a middle class, the outlawing of slavery.

On the other side, those who had once opposed smallpox vaccinations, anesthetics during childbirth, steam engines, and heliocentrism: The theologians calling for a return to a perfect age that never existed, the elderly white male politicians set in their ways, the special interest groups who stood to lose, and the many to whom science was a closed book, fearing what they couldn't understand.

And trying to play the middle, the pretenders to Deep Wisdom, uttering cached thoughts about how technology benefits humanity but only when it was properly regulated—claiming in defiance of brute historical fact that science of itself was neither good nor evil—setting up solemn-looking bureaucratic committees to make an ostentatious display of their caution—and waiting for their applause. As if the truth were always a compromise. And as if anyone could really see that far ahead. Would humanity have done better if there'd been a sincere, concerned, public debate on the adoption of fire, and commitees set up to oversee its use?

When I entered into the problem, I started out allergized against anything that pattern-matched "A...

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