we create problems up to our capacity to deal with them. However stupid or intelligent we are, we will always be dealing with problems at the edge of what we can deal with.

Were you thinking of any specific societal problems when you wrote this?

Most societal problems of today had smaller scale analogues in the past. Foreign relations, warfare, and internal security should have existed at least as long as there have been city states. Unsustainable development and overpopulation relative to available resources are nothing new; they were even cited in the main post as contributors to Ur's downfall. Likewise, public sickness, waste management, violent and coercive crime, inadequate housing, and unfavorable economic climates would all be familiar to, say, the Indus Valley Civilization. A few examples of modern anthropogenic risks: climate change, unfriendly intelligence explosion, nuclear warfare, nanotech. And then of course negentropy opportunity cost is an old problem we didn't create, we just didn't know about it back in the day.

In short, smart societies make a few new difficult problems, but mostly make larger societies which have larger versions of the old problems.