I find the attitude in Carl Olson’s letter, “Get out of the way,” symptomatic of a problem in America.

Instead of liberating us, our machines enslave us. They march us to their drumbeat of ever-increasing efficiency.

We race from here to there. We become absorbed in our desire to move unhindered.

Streets and sidewalks lose their historical and social values as places of exchange and meeting. They succumb to endless flow or congestion. We fritter away one of our most human of features: our communicative sociality.

We don’t stop to exercise the language faculties that allowed us to develop culture and technology in the first place. We have nothing but hatred for the “idiots” and their “meaningless conversation.”

I do not mean to ridicule Carl Olson or engineers. Nor do I wish to argue that technology is evil.

I simply believe that we should consider the far-reaching consequences of the technology we employ.

Michael R. Pitula

Senior

Environmental science and Spanish