Steward or Sorcerer's Apprentice?

Recently, my teacher pointed me to a book titled, Steward or Sorcerer's Apprentice? The Evaluation of Technical Progress: A Systematic Overview of Theories and Opinions by Dr. Johan Hendrik Jacob van der Pot (1994). This is truly as magnum opus as it comes: two volumes of nearly 1,500 pages and 247 chapters in all. For those who may question why would anyone be interested (or touched) to write such a work, consider this fact: JHJ van der Pot himself was inmate at 6 concentration camps during World War II and survived. For what he has seen or heard in these 6 camps, the very idea of questioning technological progress should now be doubtlessly clear. 

Here, I attach an excerpt from Chapter 193, a rather timely piece from the 1970 on today's health care debate. 

"Where once the refinement of tools was intimately related to our housing, agriculture, hunting, and sheer survival, today our tools have become separated from basic human needs. As middle-class tool makers and users have risen to affluence, burgeoning technical means have displaced human ends to become ends in themselves, symbols of 'development', 'progress', and 'science'. Even those techniques ostensibly dedicated to the preservation of human life and healing are clearly considered of more intrinsic interest and merit than the human beings they are supposed to save... The conclusion is unavoidable. There is more joy (and money) in elaborating a technique than in giving thousands of desperate people more life, health, and strength through the application of that technique. Technological 'progress' has been running further and further ahead of the people it is supposed to serve, who have died of neglect and malnutrition while a heedless profession ogled at the latest gadget. Medical costs climb out of sight in geometric progression partly because hospitals must be tooled up with the latest devices and people must be trained to use them. 'The best way' must be employed even if the patients who receive the benefits are relatively few, and relatively rich or lucky. One gets the unpleasant feeling that the real function of the patient is to test the technique and be occasionally televised as a symbolic tribute to medical research. It is no coincidence, then, that modern America produces techniques of staggering sophistication, side by side with unmet needs of equally staggering yet tragic proportions, for which there are no available techniques or resources. This inexorable divergence between what is feasible technically and what is needed humanly is the result of groveling before the God of Technique, of resolving what to do next by following meekly the direction in which the tool itself pointed, even though it pointed away from human needs towards the 'opportunity' of a circus in space and other distractions."  

- Charles Hampden-Turner cited in Chapter 193: The Mismatch Between Modern Technology and Real Human Needs in Steward or Sorcerer's Apprentice? The Evaluation of Technical Progress: A Systematic Overview of Theories and Opinions (1994) by J.H.J. van der Pot