Norbert Wiener warned about the lack of modesty when he remarked that, if digital computers had been in common use before the atomic bomb was invented, people would have said that the bomb could not have been invented without computers. But it was. And it is important to remind ourselves of how many things are quite possible to do without the use of computers. […]
Technological immodesty is always an acute danger in Technopoly, which encourages it. Technopoly also encourages insensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new ones. It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them.
Along these lines, I often marvel that we sent humans to the moon in 1969 (!!). That seems utterly preposterous given the technology of that day (or, at least, what I imagine it to be).