We have even made progress itself safer: today, new technologies are subject to much higher levels of testing and analysis before being put on the market. For instance, a century ago, little to no testing was performed on new drugs, sometimes not even animal testing for toxicity; today they go through extensive, multi-stage trials.
This seems true only for technologies that belong to a class that had safety problems before (like drugs), as opposed to completely new classes of technologies. For example, some people think social media is causing a lot of harm to individuals and culture (political polarization, increased spread of conspiracy theories, etc.), but I don’t think it went through much testing and analysis before being made available. Similarly for AI generated content (text and images), there was some amount of hand wringing before the technology was put on the market, but ultimately it doesn’t seem like the amount of testing and analysis done is proportional to the amount of potential harm it could cause. Similarly for cryptocurrencies.
This seems true only for technologies that belong to a class that had safety problems before (like drugs), as opposed to completely new classes of technologies. For example, some people think social media is causing a lot of harm to individuals and culture (political polarization, increased spread of conspiracy theories, etc.), but I don’t think it went through much testing and analysis before being made available. Similarly for AI generated content (text and images), there was some amount of hand wringing before the technology was put on the market, but ultimately it doesn’t seem like the amount of testing and analysis done is proportional to the amount of potential harm it could cause. Similarly for cryptocurrencies.