I'll put in my two cents. The issue could be seen as a variation of my sig (and related writings): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Bulldozers are made with the technology of abundance (like metal and other advanced materials, engines, supportive repair infrastructure, international delivery methods, GPS positioning, and so on). But because the owners and users of bulldozers probably mostly don't understand the irony mentioned in my sig yet, they use bulldozers from a scarcity perspective, using them more to destroy biological diverse miracles like Amazonian Rainforest (or social diverse miracles like old New York City neighborhoods) and then create precarious biological or social monocultures or other problematical things, often supporting artificial scarcity in how the new products are distributed (compared, to, say, just picking fruit off trees in the jungle while living there, or having affordable housing in a city) as the owners and users of bulldozers privatize gains while socializing risks and costs (which in aggregate might greatly outweigh the privatized gains, as a net blight on human society and the rest of Nature). An alternative is to use those same technologies of abundance differently to build a world that overall works better for everyone.

So, the "safeguard" for bulldozers is ultimately a transcendent shift in perspective spreading outward from people who have an "aha" moment about this to others some of whom own and use bulldozers and who also become similarly enlightened. For a fictional example of this happening, see James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear

Or, for another fictional story, coincidentally by the same author who wrote the 1944 short story "Killdozer!", Theodore Sturgeon, see his later 1956 short story "The Skills of Xanadu" (a story which envisioned nanotech and mobile wirelessly-networked wearable computing, and also inspired Ted Nelson's work on hypertext and "Xanadu" and so indirectly helped inspire the World Wide Web): https://ia601205.us.archive.org/22/items/theodore-sturgeon-/...

Radio theater version: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08

This same sorts of transcendent perspective shift as a safeguard applies to things like nuclear energy use and AI, as I discuss here: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Also related on global mindshift (a bit simplistic perhaps compared to imagining overlapping fields of agency and priority, but still encouraging): "The Wombat (All is One)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHyH3MPgZDo

This is off the top of my head, not having thought about the bulldozer theme much. Maybe I will have a better analogical idea on this later.

Totally tangential, but today I just saw a blurb about a new book on Abundance: https://newrepublic.com/article/192061/ezra-klein-derek-thom... "Klein and Thompson’s vision for more effective government is something like an anti-DOGE: They imagine a future United States where careful and informed elected officials find ways to strip back the barriers to effective policy and allow the government to invest efficiently in underdeveloped pockets of society. They call for an “abundance agenda.” Abundance here does not mean the greater access to disposable money and goods for which twentieth-century liberals fought. For Klein and Thompson, abundance means a government that is capable of building things, capable of innovation, and capable of implementation at scale."

Hi Paul, thanks for this! Also thanks for popping out ( into my perception ) . I saved some of the links you point to in your hn bio and plan to come back multiple times. It gives me some hope to see that there are folks working for sanity.