Who needs to?

“The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximise the time and place for production and minimise the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them."
(Solnit, Rebecca; Wanderlust: a History of Walking; pg 10)

“Machine interposition has increased exponentially, until today 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 told, as extensions of our minds and senses, but as replacements for them. One is told, "Let's wait until the test results come back." "
(Cytowic, Richard; The Man Who Tasted Shapes; pg 38)

Who needs to write when you can type?
Who needs to talk when you can txt?
Who needs to learn to play an instrument when the sounds can be produced digitally?
Who needs to visit a shop when you can visit a website?
Who needs to visit places when google earth shows you everything from your computer chair?
Who needs to make when objects can be made with rapid prototype systems?

The craft of living is being eraditacted by the influx of technology.
We are all too swept up in the awe of how quickly things can be done that we stop to consider whether we actually enjoyed the process of acquiring the outcome.

Our intellectual and virtual spheres are ever expanding, but at the cost of our physical engagement and connection to the world we live in. The world that we have to actually exist in to be able to access these technologies.

"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 though we intended for it to serve us."

(Cytowic, Richard; The Man Who Tasted Shapes; pg 39)