"any kind of decentralized, democratic or liberal political structure thrives best when defense is easy, and suffers the most challenge when defense is hard - in those cases, the far more likely outcome is some period of war of all against all, and eventually an equilibrium of rule by the strongest." A good (but long) blog post on focusing our collective efforts on developing defensive technologies to slant the future away from dystopia.

d/acc: one year later

Thanks @Josh Brown for the link!