Fareed Zakaria's book "The Age of Revolutions" goes into a lot of these points They're all very interesting.

Perhaps all this recent rapid change is why the world is so anxious. We've not had a chance to get a grasp on this new world.

And if change doesn't slow down, we never will. We haven't had several centuries to assess the world we've created, in order to assess where we go next.

The catalyst for our current situation was science and technology. It's been a runaway horse, while we fret sitting in the coach. We can't slow the horse, and we can't (safely) jump out of the carriage.

Maybe new science and technology will give us a leg up. Or perhaps more likely, civilization will crash, and we'll have to start again from something approaching scratch. What wisdom will our descendants have?