Technology

Nothing new, in the olden days people were lured into helping foreign (or not) intelligence services by gambling debts, honey traps, even simply impressions of doing that work.

Money, women, feeling of freedom\power. But that was limited to specific situations.

Now we all exist connected to a system allowing systems of reward and punishment of any arbitrary level of sophistication. So those are used to great effect.

Mark Zuckerberg, despite being a bitch, is a visionary. He's a psychology major, BTW. Such things, when people accomplished in some area achieve a lot in a rapidly developing different one, should be noticed, that's where all the important change is. Everything sufficiently new is a triangle, like a syllogism.

So. Money + games = gambling. Computers + gambling = gambling machine. Internet + social instincts = the Web. Gambling machine + the Web = whatever we live in, in the dimension described, which would be money.

One can also describe a similar process for the other two things. Yes, feeling of freedom\power too.

So. We live in a time where willpower and lack thereof is the most important factor. We have all the technology needed to build a thousand heavens for most common tastes. But we also have humans lacking willpower and vulnerable to knowledge of human psychology applied immorally.

So the question of solving social problems with technical means, which was contentious since Renaissance, has already been resolved. That's why our world looks like receding into global middle ages, in some sense it is - technical progress as an answer to everything has ran out, and people around us find new gods for themselves.

I'm optimistic, while I agree with the answer to that question, I also think that experience gained along the way will help.