he took the words right out of my mind (and he did it before id even thought of them!)

here are a few quotes from a book im currently reading on synesthesia : The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard E. Cytowic, M.D. i had to stop reading and keep my bookmark in place so i could read them over a few times before moving on. Cytowic pretty much summed up how i feel about our society and technology. put down on paper what i havent been able to properly word yet. so ill put the direct quotes in here, because i couldnt have said it better myself.

"Who stopped to ask which of todays techniques would be tomorrow's leeches? Who even asked in technological gain in one place might not force a loss somewhere else? Who asked if the price was worth it? I would not deny that the science of medicine benefited from this technological explosion, but, like most blessings, it was mixed."
pg 37

"We have paid with dollars and our humanity ever since the stethoscope appeared as the first instrument to come between patient and pphysician. The art of medicine has steadily yielded to the calculus of objectivity and the tabulation of hard data. This economy has inflation, too. Machine interposition has increased exponentially, until todeay we have hardly any touching and little real human contact. Patients have been reduced to objects, and physicians to dispassionate feeders of the machines.
As a group, physicians are becoming as evasive as politicians. A direct answer is hard to get because machines are used not as toold, as extensions of our minds and senses, but as replacements for them. One is told, "Let's wait until the test results come back." "
pg 38

"We have long believed as a society that technology serves us - we believe it saves lives, makes our work easier, improves communication, and is mostly good. I believe that, hardly realising it, we have come to serve technology even tho we intended for it to serve us."
pg 39

"This diefication of the machine is, of course, not unique to medicine or even to science. Many authors have written eloquently on this point. While constructed by humans, a technological society ironically dehumanizes us by tranforming it faster than the human psyche can cope. Up to the time of the industrial revolution, the tempo of living was tolerable and the conditions of life ramined reasonably constant from generation to generation. As a result, individuals could develop a sense of connection, which itself was often the foundation for a rich spiritual life. Change was gradual enough that each person had a mental snapshot by which he or she knew what to expect in life.
But today technology changes the conditions of life so rapidly that just as you get yourself related to one set of conditions, another comes along. This causes anxiety and displacement. It is impossible to develop stability and psychological depth in a rapidly changing world. By removing us from the human centre I believe that machines have taken us away form the depths at which we really live and abandoned us to a superficial existence."
pg 41