Technology is the ultimate driving force behind history. Technology cares nothing for human welfare, or for which people happens to be in the ascendant. It shows no preference for peace over war, and happily exploits both. As is the case with the gene, so also technology's sole object is its own survival, evolution and propagation. Technology cares only for its own advance, which it pursues with relentless tenacity.
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
R. Buckminster Fuller
I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.
I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.
In the future, airplanes will be flown by a dog and a pilot. And the dog's job will be to make sure that if the pilot tries to touch any of the buttons, the dog bites him.
This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man — if man is not enslaved by it.
Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.