Technology as a Threat to Ordinary Human Life in Households Today

Abstract

This conflict is between the unnatural progeny of inventive genius and men. It is a war to the death between technology and the ordinary functions of living. The rights to these human functions are the natural rights of man, and they are threatened now, in the twentieth, not in the eighteenth, century for the first time. Unless man asserts and defends them he is doomed, to use a chemical analogy, to hop about like sodium on water, burning up his own energy. But since a power machine is ultimately dependent on human control, the issue presents an awful spectacle: men, run mad by their inventions, supplanting themselves with inanimate objects. This is, to follow the matter to its conclusion, a moral and spiritual suicide, foretelling an actual physical destruction.1