Hasn't every civilization ever constructed eventually collapsed? — Hippyhead

Yes:
Nature consists of competition, evolution and survival of the fittest at the Genetic level.
Civilisation is competition, evolution and survival of the fittest at meme level.
How else can there be progress in understanding and movement towards wisdom?

Civilisation is competition, evolution and survival of the fittest at meme level — Chris1952Engineer

So I'm suggesting an evolution from a "more is better" relationship with knowledge which was appropriate in a long era when knowledge was scarce, to a more sophisticated relationship appropriate to an era of knowledge explosion. Moving beyond "more is better" will inevitably involve learning how to say no to some knowledge.

5) Thus, science gives human beings new powers at an ever accelerating pace.

6) Human maturity and judgment advances at an incremental pace at best, if at all. [...] — Hippyhead

I think what you are alluding to is more to do with rationality than science itself. Science is only a death trap if you do not have the reasoning skills to properly make decisions and distinguish between multiple forms of alternatives and alternative thinking-styles to optimize toward ones betterment. The pace at which a human judges something is an inability to suppress intuition to discern and make better judgment. There also may be present a fixation on the hypothetical, which is a facet of rationality as well, and can be mitigated and controlled through integrated reasoning skills, not only scientific in nature. There is a tendency for people to cling to hypotheticals on the basis of scientific thought, because being the smartest appeals more than being most reasonable, but this is not inherently problematic in itself.

With diminished rationality, science can be misused ineffectively to where we cannot see a significant change in result and goals. People still moving at fast-pace, but foolishly. It is not the science that is the death trap, but the poorly made decision-processes diminished by underdeveloped forms of reasoning. Even with science we see those still fetishizing pseudoscentific methods or falling victim to scientism.

Science is only a death trap if you do not have the reasoning skills to properly make decisions and distinguish between multiple forms of alternatives and alternative thinking-styles to optimize toward ones betterment. — Cobra

Agreed, science in itself is just a knowledge generating machine, a tool, a neutral phenomena, neither good nor bad in itself. And, "more is better" science was appropriate in the long era of knowledge scarcity. We no longer live in that old era, so it seems reasonable to question whether the "more is better" relationship with knowledge, and thus science, is still appropriate.

So far we do have adequate reasoning skills to manage a great deal of the knowledge explosion. The problem is that the knowledge explosion now creates powers of enormous scale that brief failures of rationality can lead to game over events.

It is not the science that is the death trap, but the poorly made decision-processes diminished by underdeveloped forms of reasoning. — Cobra

We've suffered from poor decision making since the beginning. But previously the powers available to us were sufficiently limited that even huge mistakes did not crash the system. It is science which gave us powers of sufficient scale to crash the system.

We are being seduced by irrelevant examples from the past. Example, WWII was a horror show, but the mess was cleaned up in about a generation or so. WWIII will be a horror show too, but the mess won't be cleaned up for centuries, if ever.

We look back at WWII and see we got over it, a very long established pattern. That pattern is outdated, irrelevant, it no longer applies. Our technology races ahead, while our philosophy (relationship with knowledge) remains stuck in the past. The gap between the two is widening at an ever accelerating pace.

Moving beyond "more is better" will inevitably involve learning how to say no to some knowledge. — Hippyhead

How do you propose to control the spread of knowledge and halt experiments in "dangerous" areas.
Saying no to proliferation of nuclear weapons and some aspects of genetic engineering has not worked well so far.
Who is censor going to be? You? The UN? An AI?
How do you propose to enforce the rules?

Sounds like "Big Brother/1984" to me.

Yes. Not at first, not right away, and not by intent of design or nature of pursuit. But yes. The only question is for who. And due to the nature of science and technological innovation, can be one of the few true toss ups we have today. Of course, like responsible procreation, just because you stop and act responsibly doesn't mean everyone else will. And so, becomes an inevitable and necessary evil of a sort. Something of a race to oblivion I suppose. You learn to make the best of things.

How do you propose to control the spread of knowledge and halt experiments in "dangerous" areas — Chris1952Engineer

Based on what I can observe, and about a thousand conversations on this subject....

1) Wait

2) Watch the civilization collapse

3) Wait a long time

4) Try again

I used to think we could reason our way around this, but no longer. It's too big of a shift to be accomplished with reason alone. But, to debate my own point, it's at least possible some calamity like a limited nuclear war might change the status quo mindset sufficiently.

To partially address your question, here's an example.

For a very long time humans lived on the edge of starvation, and so a "more is better" relationship with food was rational. In much of today's world obesity is a bigger threat than hunger, so we're in the process of editing the ancient "more is better" relationship with food. We've moved from a food scarcity to a food plenty situation, which is requiring an update to our relationship with food. Progress made the old relationship outdated and dangerous.

This examples illustrates the kind of philosophical adaptation required in our relationship with knowledge, and offers some hope of success. But I don't have the answer of exactly how that happens.

However, I am flattered by the question, which I've heard many times. The question seems to assume that if Hippyhead can't fix this, that proves that nobody can. :-) A charming fantasy!

Science is amazing.

No. Science isn't a death trap. Science is rightly, both a tool and an instruction manual for use of those tools. We use the tools - however, we don't read the instructions.

Or, in your own terms the 'driver' refuses to learn to drive - ignores science as a road map, and accelerates in pursuit of ideological power and profit.

Interestingly, all this dates back 400 years to the trial of Galileo, 1634 - for the heresy of proving the earth orbits the sun. The effect on subsequent philosophy was to divorce science as an understanding of reality/Creation - from science as a tool.

The Industrial Revolution began 1730, using the tools of science, while science as an understanding of reality remained a heresy - such that, in 1859, Darwin's publication of Origin of Species was met with howls of indignation from the Church.

This dynamic continues even now. In 2008, Craig Venter created artificial life in the lab, and was condemned by certain groups for "playing God." Meanwhile, for lack of recognition as true knowledge of reality, or any moral authority - science continues, whoring itself out to government and industry.

Imagine if the Church had welcomed Galileo as discovering the means to decode the word of God made manifest in Creation, lent science moral authority as the word of God, and pursued scientific truth. The application of technology would have been in relation to a scientific understanding of reality, and we wouldn't be looking down the double barrelled shotgun of the climate and ecological crisis. Instead, it would have been as if a red carpet unfurled at the feet of man - turning the world into a sustainable prosperous paradise, and confirming God's blessings.

Already points 2 and 3 are very problematic. I doubt the vast majority of research is done to "edit our environment", it's mostly done out of curiosity.

But putting that aside, there's a problem here with the word "knowledge" which has somewhat English specific connotations. To say that knowledge "feeds back on itself, resulting in an ever accelerating rate of knowledge development", implies that knowledge is a "thing" that self-increases and further builds on itself. Not quite, people use the results of scientific experiments, in a manner that a portion of it could be called "knowledge" of a theoretical variety, not the the type of knowledge one gets by wielding power, for example.

Of course, there's then a bunch of stuff in research that is useless and can be thrown away. But power and knowledge are quite different in this respect, because as mentioned, the knowledge provided by science is not the type of knowledge used in "manifest reality."

So even if we now have the capacity to use nuclear weapons or any other type of weapon, the problem is political/structural more than related to "knowledge" per se. How people use the technology developed is a societal problem, not a methodological one, it seems to me.

To assume that science knows reality is impossible, because it can only know objects previously cut to adapt to the availability of its methods. These objects do not exist in themselves, they do not exist as reality. Everything that exists, exists simultaneously in various dimensions of reality. For example, you take a cow “Ah, the cow is a biological being!” well and isn’t she a chemical being? Isn’t a physical one? Or an economic one? Is it not a sociological being? She belongs to all of this at the same time! Is there any science that can study it on all these aspects? No. This thing has different aspects and dimensions that intersect, this is what is called the concrete being. Science does not teach us reality, it highlights certain aspects that, properly articulated with other aspects, help us to see reality.

But one science does not replace the other, and it cannot speak about the object of the other. And the idea of ​​”inter-science” is another nonsense, because you have several observations obtained by methods that are not exchangeable, and then you add everything up and think that you are talking about the concrete object when you are actually talking about a sum of abstractions. A concrete object is what any human being knows. If you take a billionaire from New York and a priest from New Guinea, they have the same understanding of concrete objects that everyone else has! What we call reality is what presents itself to human beings.

Animals do not know reality. They, like science, also know abstract things. They only know what is appropriate for their own system of perception that is not of another species, whereas we have the perception of all species! We can understand how the cat sees, how amoeba feels things, we have this notion of concrete reality in its entirety, only the human being has that! The human being and the angels, of course, but bodily beings just us. No scientist can overcome this, the vision of concreteness belongs to the human being as a species, there is no other reality.

So the reality is not there and we that do not perceive it, no, the reality is exactly what we perceive. “Ah, but it is always incomplete”, so tell me the idea of ​​a complete reality that can be presentable to anyone. You cannot. That is, showing itself only in certain aspects is proper to all reality, that is the structure of reality. For example, you take the cube; how many sides does the cube have? There are six, you only see three! Is this a limitation of our perception? No, it is a limitation of the cube, and so on.

To assume that science knows reality is impossible, — Rafaella Leon

No it's not. I'm doing it right now. I am assuming science knows reality. Piece of cake!