Will we have the foresight to face the world's problems squarely, or instead retreat from them into superstition and ignorance?

Tim O'Reilly writes:

"...we may find technological solutions that propel us into a new golden age of robots, collective intelligence, and an economy built around "the creative class." But it's at least as probable that as we fail to find those solutions quickly enough, the world falls into apathy, disbelief in science and progress, and after a melancholy decline, a new dark age. 

"Civilizations do fail. We have never yet seen one that hasn't. The difference is that the torch of progress has in the past always passed to another region of the world. But we've now, for the first time, got a single global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together."

The Rise Of Anti-Intellectualism And The End Of Progress (Edge.org)