“Technology is itself a political phenomenon. A crucial turning point comes when one is able to acknowledge that modern techniques, much more than politics as conventionally understood, now legislates the conditions of human existence"
“It is (technological) somnambulism (rather than determinism) that characterizes technological politics- on the left, right, and centre equally"
“Another worthy principle would be: That technologies be built with a high degree of flexibility and mutability"
“Is sign of the maturity of modern civilization would be its recollection of that lost sense of appropriateness in the judgement of means. We would profit from regaining. Our powers of selectivity and our ability to say "no" as well as "yes" to a technological prospect. There are now many cases in which we would want to say:" after all a Temptation is not very tempting".
The paragraphs quoted above from the book shows how the author Langdon winner looked in to the questions of myth/ reality of autonomous technology. His primary question was to analyse what we mean by autonomy and mastery of technology and what is the epistemological root of this conventional understanding. rather than looking in to technology as a juggernaut out of control or technology as neutral , he put forward a new idea called ' technological somnambulism, which thoroughly tries to indicate where and when human agency is lost and how technology became a Frankenstein monster, which reminds its own irresponsible creator of what it need to do. the complementary argument of the author is to find out an alternative technological innovation along with destroying earlier 'life style' of technology, which he calls as epistemological luddism for a better flexible technology. By comparing with ancients who knew "about the meeting point at which ethics, politics and technics came together. the sense which we lost in the contemporary era.
