It's a great point, and a concern I share. The thing that makes me so optimistic is that prosperity and abundance really change the game. We've seen this historically again and again. When something is scarce or expensive, that's when people argue, debate, fight, go to war. When it's sufficiently cheap and abundant and free of terrible side-effects, then people stop fighting over it.

So, when clean energy and clean food and automation converge to render themselves and virtually everything else superabundant, that opens up a huge new opportunity to stop fighting and start cooperating.

Prosperity really is a fundamental enabling condition of cooperation - and it's of course self-reinforcing. There is a crucial corollary here too, which is that if we voluntarily dive into scarcity by downsizing and degrowing economically in the name of sustainability, we will shoot ourselves in the foot, because scarcity (aka poverty, let's not kid ourselves) will foment conflict of every kind. Concerns about the environment and sustainability are some of the first things to go out the window amidst poverty and social conflict.