Philip K. Dick
I love the fact I can get email, watch videos, scan the news, look up book reviews, see pictures, learn, and so on via the Internet, but there’s a lot of truch to being tied too much to a computer. Online banking has made things a lot easier, but it too has eliminated the interactions that take place from going to the bank. A Vonnegut idea, he loved the day to day interactions, the lip stick that the lady at the post office put on just for him.
From the NY Times.
‘Dick died before the onset of the Internet age and never saw a BlackBerry, an iPod or a modern-day cellphone. Even so, the characters he created are routinely shackled and brought low by technological innovations that were ostensibly created to improve human existence. Dick was fully engaged in the science of cybernetics — which supposes a similarity between machine and human functioning — and deeply alarmed about what he saw as the encroachment of programmable machinery into human life.’