Technology can be understood as a powerful means of materializing the ideal world. At the same time, it has been described as having an evil power to bring about disastrous outcome. What is important in the question of technology is not a simple bina ...

Technology can be understood as a powerful means of materializing the ideal world. At the same time, it has been described as having an evil power to bring about disastrous outcome. What is important in the question of technology is not a simple binary opposition of two extremes but a complex reality of technology neither to be given up nor to be heavily depended upon. Obviously, technology can be understood as both an appropriate way to maximize human potential power and a perilous risk to confine and reduce the limitless human potentiality into a restricted narrow scope.
The Crying of Lot 49, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? and Terminator 2 confer on us the possibility of viewing technology from dual perspectives. In particular, Yoyodyne in The Crying of Lot 49 is succeeded by Cyberdyne in Terminator 2. The progress from Yoyodyne to Cybedyne signifies that the power of technology has immensely increased with drastic development of technology in the past quarter century. Difficulties in solving the technology-related problems in Terminator 2 testify to the difficulty of making a keen analysis and coming to a clear understanding of technology in proportion as technology becomes more powerful.
Machines like digital computers, rockets, and moving pictures work under the principle of reducing fluid reality into static dots. Basically, however, machines are made by men. Human viewpoints have been projected onto the working principles of the machines. What really matters, therefore, is not the machines themselves, but the human viewpoints imposed on the technologies. The limits of machines arise out of the limits of humans, so that getting away from the limits of machines would be possible only by overcoming human limits.