I’m going to talk Star Wars vs. Indiana Jones for a second here. Also the birth process. George Lucas makes a movie wherein a futuristic society is being oppressed by generic looking guys in plastic suits that live in a stark, metallic monstrosity of technology that eats planets, those little wombs of life, for breakfast; and led by a dark cyborg with a deep, machine-like voice. They were eventually beaten in a scene where spear-like space-fighters rose from a stone temple in a jungle by some kid who used a ‘living force’ to guide his proton torpedo rather than the nifty digital readout that handily slid in front of his eye if he needed it.
Then the same screen-writer turned around and made a movie about a 1930’s adventurer dressed in a leather jacket with a manly three-day growth of beard who digs up the past wherein there lies power.
This was a slingshot from extreme-futurism to extreme-pastism.
Now consider for a moment with me the recent trend toward naturalism. That is to say, organic gardening, natural birthing, and the classy-retro look of ancient Greek architecture cast about with African masks and Egyptian mysticism.

We, that is, humanity, are capable of such technological advancement. Were we, for a moment, all to embrace the trend of progress at all costs, to leave entirely the ideas of the past in progression toward whatever future lies ahead of us, we would speed toward that future at a frightening rate. Which I guess is the point. We are afraid of progress, of the future, of, to state it bluntly, losing our humanity. We are scared of becoming “More machine than man. Twisted and evil.�

Or, look at it this way: we sit in our nests of technology enjoying simulated experiences with electronics at our every fingertip to solve all our problems. A bad day is one where the remote goes missing and our cell phone is out of service. Yet for all this removal from nature, we still come squeezing out our mother’s loins in a beautiful and disgusting natural miracle. And we are still pretty heavily involved with all manner of bodily excretions.
So the question becomes, is it a good thing or a bad thing to progress and develop toward technology? Or why would it be a bad thing? We produce fiction yearly that predicts machines rising up and destroying us or at the very least enslaving us. This is pretty extreme as far as paranoid fears might go, but I think its more or less enacting on the secret fears that we have, the ones that tell us that we are becoming more and more dependant on our creations to the point that, should we lose them, we would not know how to live in a wild and natural earth.
Perhaps the reason we fear technology is that we have created it in our image, and our own nature scares us. What if machines act like we do? Imagine, for instance, how humans might react should they awaken to discover that they are simply the creations of a higher power. I imagine that they might resent being lower than something else, that they might focus on furthering their own goals, and perhaps obtaining the power of their creator for themselves. It’s likely they would try to destroy their creator. Or, failing that, they might work very hard to forget, ignore, or wean themselves from any sort of respect or service due to their creator. Generations past, the creator might still hold sway with some humans, but by and large my impression is that most people would live from birth to death in a state of introverted selfish ambition. If machines started acting like that, we, their creators, would be screwed.

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