>The "overly" in that sentence is a value judgement. It may or may not be 'overly' to have a number of concerns over certain advances.
I agree, it is a value judgement. I agree it is possible that people today may or may not be overly concerned. But outside of maths, we only have value judgements to know what is a good decision and what is a bad decision. It all depends on what we want. What the author is pointing out is that you can't have your cake and eat it too - if we are so concerned about the environment to the point that it limits technological progress, then we'll have less technological progress than we would otherwise have had. I'm not sure you can argue with that. Maybe that's a good thing from some people's point of view, but for other people (including probably many people living several decades ago) the current level of concern that we have for the environment today would be unduly high compared with their perceived benefits from technological progress. But maybe we have our level of concern exactly right? Who knows?
>The difference between the 60's and current day is that they had fewer examples of the disastrous negative consequences that can accompany new inventions.
In absolute terms this is correct. Of course the present has more examples of something happening than the past. But you are forgetting that we have more examples of positive consequences in that have accompanied new inventions too. Why should the negative consequences be weighted more heavily than the positive consequences?
In relative terms, I have to disagree with you though. People living in the 60's had either lived through 1 or 2 world wars or had relatives and friends that recently lived through 2 world wars. Both of these wars exploited technological advances that meant more people could suffer the brutality of war than at any previous time in history.
>"We cannot know the consequences of our actions until we act" is not entirely true - we can infer and put in reasonable risk management processes.
You changed what I wrote, which isn't very polite. I said we cannot know "all" the consequences. I think when the word "all" is included it's hard to argue with. You are right though that we can try to manage risks, but the point I was making in the context of the article is that there is a risk when not acting too, which is difficult to measure but isn't 0.
I think this discussion has made me think more about what the author was trying to say - that people living today focus on the negatives of technological advances. I actually wonder if the language of "risk" has made that worse. I talk about risks myself all the time in my day job... something to think about :)