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gwern comments on How Islamic terrorists reduced terrorism in the US - Less Wrong Discussion
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Or simply that societal wealth is growing. If each person is worth their lifetime output, then in societies with higher output per person, even with fixed terrorist effectiveness and cost of terrorism*, the monetary cost will increase. But this has no relevance to any sort of x-risk claim, because society is also wealthier and better able to absorb the damage without x-risk-level collapse.
* there's not really much reason to expect terrorism costs to increase over time. Guns are cheap.
And as James points out, technology does not necessarily have to be a one-way ratchet.
That's certainly true, but the interesting question remains -- is that all there is to it?
Also note that I am not talking about x-risk: if the contemporary Western society turns out to be too specialized to survive a change in the environment (a very common scenario in evolution), that doesn't mean the humans die out -- all it means is that this particular form of society didn't work out well.