I might have misunderstood it when I read it (and it has been a while), but I thought the general idea was about shitty Nash equilibria.

So far capitalism has driven moral progress and increased standards of living, but maybe we'd be wrong to trust it forever. If the logical end result of following progress is us innovating ourselves out of existence (AI, nuclear weapons, whatever) then we might need to take drastic measures to avoid the default outcome, get off the path we're on and onto a different one.