Science and technology are great bets. Their benefits are much greater than their harms. Whenever you get a chance to bet something significantly less than everything in the world on science or technology, you should take it. Your occasional losses will be dwarfed by your frequent and colossal gains. If we’d gone full-speed-ahead on nuclear power, we might have had one or two more Chernobyls - but we’d save the tens of thousands of people who die each year from fossil-fuel-pollution-related diseases, end global warming, and have unlimited cheap energy.

But science and technology aren’t perfect bets.

But you never bet everything you’ve got on a bet, even when it’s great. Pursuing a technology that could destroy the world is betting 100%.

It’s not that you should never do this. Every technology has some risk of destroying the world; the first time someone tried vaccination, there was an 0.000000001% chance it could have resulted in some weird super-pathogen that killed everybody.