Paraphrasing Yuval Harari:
The ability to share stories in order to cooperate on a large scale is what separates humans from other animals. Money is a good story invented to inspire economic cooperation. Human rights are a good story we invented to inspire social cooperation. The most important thing is whether or not people are collectively willing to accept the story.
The best things and the worst things humans do are based on our collective stories. Religious conflicts are based on stories. Political conflicts are based on stories.
New technology requires new types of cooperation, and therefore new stories. The industrial revolution challenged social cooperation in that there were new classes of people that were economically displaced by new technology. New technology generates fear which pushes people towards fundamentalism - a reinvigorated return to the old stories. In response to the industrial revolution, the Pope declared he was infallible, Muslims in the middle east enacted theocracy, and Hinduism also had a return to Vedic scriptural dogmatism. The biggest war at the time of the industrial revolution was in China where a man, claiming to be the brother of Jesus, tried and failed to overthrow the government in order to bring his religious utopia with the cost of 20 million lives.
Communism was a new story, a techno-religion, that tried to update humanity in the face of the industrial revolution's social pressure. Nazism was a new story that also tried to inspire their people in a time of suffering. These new stories unfortunately inspired death, just like religious stories had centuries prior.
Before the industrial revolution, questions about metaphysics divided humanity. With the onset of communist philosophy, questions about economics began to divide humanity. Russia and the USA almost destroyed the entire planet over a disagreement over economic stories.
This is all very relevant today since we are coming into a new industrial revolution that again will challenge our stories, and create a dichotomy between those who want to retreat to old stories and those who want to embrace new stories.
But can old religious stories have any valuable insight on modern issues like genetic engineering, stem cell research, AI, global sustainability, and weapons of mass destruction? The faster technology advances, the less and less relevant old stories become, and therefore the greater our need for new stories becomes. Yet, with new stories come the inherent danger of them not being tested in the furnace of natural selection. New stories can be dangerous and result in millions of deaths as they did in the 20th century. The precautionary principle would advise us to be wary of implementing new ideas since most ideas are failures. We must be wiser in how we craft our stories to guide the 21st century.
https://youtu.be/eOO5xrEiC0M