“The point of living in a technologically advanced society is that minimal effort can produce maximal results”

This discrepancy between difficulty and danger is our civilization’s signature, from machine guns to atomic bombs. You press a pedal and two tons of metal lurches down the city avenue; you pull a trigger and twenty enemies die; you waggle a button and cities burn. The point of living in a technologically advanced society is that minimal effort can produce maximal results. Making hard things easy is the path to convenience; it is also the lever of catastrophe.

Adam Gopnik, “The Driver’s Seat”, The New Yorker (2 February 2015), 51.