What highly shocked me after reading was that the book was actually written over a hundred year ago, when the Second Industrial Revolution nearly reached its peak and steel and iron, the basic materials for machines, were first allowed to be mass produced. Depicting such a world overwhelmed with machines and lack of various physical actions and inner thoughts, Forster, the prophet in a sense, warn we modern citizens of reflecting on our constant pursuit of technological “advancement”.
We are now unprecedently rely on such mechanical technologies. When receiving information bombarded by the internet, we kind of dumbing themselves down, claiming that “First hand experience is dismissed as being impressions developed from fear, and therefore uncivilized”. Confronted with a machine-providing-answer era, we are indulged in the convenience offered by technologies, thus gradually resisting the real world, losing his/her original judgement. What on earth will happen if one day machines truly stop? We don’t know, but we should always keep ourselves alert and become INDEPENDENT anyway.
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