Technologically, we are heading toward being forced to put an AI in charge. Humans can't coordinate enough inputs without oversimplification and blind faith in things like Competition, Fate, Luck, etc., and a human is more likely to avoid reality in some imagined transcendental state than to get our hands dirty nurturing the soil or each other. Market civilization is an evolutionary trap that we must break to somehow see an intentional path, and our animal instincts have been empowered by the profits of selfish individualism. "Clever will substitute for intelligence for a time, then you die."

Then again, the AI might just decide it isn't really going to solve a problem that can't be solved and it will shut itself off.

Nature's usual tool is the negative and positive feedback mechanisms that result from long-term adaptation. Humans think that our short-term cleverness can override the need for natural feedback to control the billions of years of instincts, even as our marketers use those instincts to destroy our future.

Sales tax is less regressive than a dead planet, and simple to implement. Yet, here we are: consuming ourselves to death with "always low prices" and government giving tax incentives to "create jobs" without questioning what the jobs will do to contribute to the future of our places.

Humans can imagine we live in a Petri dish, but we don't believe it.