Civic technology lags behind science
Kardashev ambitions reveal the self-destructive nature of science-forward intelligence. It’s like we’re skipping the prerequisite in social science. There's a fair chance that intelligent life destroys itself because civic technology lags behind hard technology—but I'm optimism in the sense that this is, in the end, just a very hard, society-scale design problem. No one person can fix the whole system, but any individual can contribute design protocols that can 1) solve little, local problems, 2) be reused in other contexts, and 3) integrate with other protocols.