Hannah Arendt (1958):
The discussion of the whole problem of technology, that is, of the transformation of life and world through the introduction of the machine, has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful. Their instrumentality is understood exclusively in this anthropocentric sense. But the instrumentality of tools and implements is much more closely related to the object it is designed to produce, and their sheer “human value” is restricted to the use the animal laborans makes of them. In other words, homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not—at least, not primarily—to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.
… In place of both utility and beauty, which are standards of the world, we have come to design products that still fulfil certain “basic functions” but whose shape will be primarily determined by the operation of the machine. The “basic functions” are of course the functions of the human animal’s life process, since no other function is basically necessary, but the product itself—not only its variations but even the “total change to a new product”—will depend entirely upon the capacity of the machine.
To design objects for the operational capacity of the machine instead of designing machines for the production of certain objects would indeed be the exact reversal of the means-end category, if this category still made any sense. … As matters stand today, it has become as senseless to describe this world of machines in terms of means and ends as it has always been senseless to ask nature if she produced the seed to produce a tree or the tree to produce the seed. By the same token it is quite probable that the continuous process pursuant to the channeling of nature’s never-ending processes into the human world, though it may very well destroy the world qua world as human artifice, will as reliably and limitlessly provide the species man-kind with the necessities of life as nature herself did before men erected their artificial home on earth and set up a barrier between nature and themselves.
For a society of laborers, the world of machines has become a substitute for the real world, even though this pseudo world cannot fulfil the most important task of the human artifice, which is to offer mortals a dwelling place more permanent and more stable than themselves. In the continuous process of operation, this world of machines is even losing that independent worldly character which the tools and implements and the early machinery of the modern age so eminently possessed. The natural processes on which it feeds increasingly relate it to the biological process itself, so that the apparatuses we once handled freely begin to look as though they were “shells belonging to the human body as the shell belongs to the body of a turtle.” Seen from the vantage point of this development, technology in fact no longer appears “as the product of a conscious human effort to enlarge material power, but rather like a biological development of mankind in which the innate structures of the human organism are transplanted in an ever-increasing measure into the environment of man.”