This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, arteries harden. Every year, there are more referees and fewer doers. When you've had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.

If you punish people too much for failure, then they will respond accordingly and the innovation you will get will be very incrementalist. Nobody's going to try anything bold for fear of getting fired or punished in some way. The risk/reward must be balanced, in favor of making bold moves.

If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea.

Possibly, the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist.

An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.