Another excellent post of ghdprentice... Thanks for this...
But your history pointed to something we are now able to understand because it is at the cost of our own survival...
You do not commented on my point above at all but repeated the list of useless fears linked to any change in history...
Some politician once wanted to put wall alongside rails by fear of the new tech... We all know this history you refer to ...
What we do not all know is the point McLuhan made above between language as medium and technology as media being the same ...
Did you understand what he means by that ?
He means that language/speech is anchored in the body /Bios and linked it to the mind/Logos...He means metaphor and analogy are related to our power to create technology and are ruled by the same four factors driving all medias from our senses, language to the highest technology : extension of one of our senses or abilities by technology, obsolescence of past habits or past technology or like in the oral phase replaced by writing transformation of our gestures and emphasis on abstract object,retrieval of older medium (like radio recreating tribalism in Germany or our actual web recreating new kind of tribalism) , reversal of his properties by a medium when pushes to its limits.
These factors supposed a common link a common root between bios and logos between our body our tools and our language...
the fifth factor unobserved by McLuhan : auto-destruction appear when the relation between human language and human technologies are captured by an alien agent, when mankind become the tool of A.I. when our language and our technology do not belong to us anymore...
A prompt creating a song in few second do not made of the prompter the creator and the owner of the song and do not transform him in an artist by the power of a magical intention as said larsman above .
Then giving us a common place history of technological fears will not replace thinking about the actual era and the difference between A.I. and our past tools...
Our language is our soul,our technologies are our body.
When A.I. as autonomous agent out of our social fabric and out of Nature capture them for the benefit of few oligarchs, giving people lessons about adaptation resemble someone advising how to swim to better adapt when the Titanic goes in the abyss...
Some oligarch said it openly the few able to adapt very rapidly will benefit... What a consolation and what means this advice ?... Society and freedom are not for the happy few or for 1% elite but for all ...
Singing with the techno cultists welcome dear A.I. solve all our problems is singing and "blowing with the wind " with the deceived unlike Ulysses hearing the sirens ..
« A metaphor is a phone call between two objects»-- Groucho Marx teaching technology 
I am very concerned about AI alignment. But putting that aside... change is typically considered unique and bad this time:
1. Socrates (5th century BCE)
Yep, the Socrates. He warned that writing would destroy our memory and our ability to think deeply.
He said people would “seem to know much, while actually knowing nothing.”
Basically: “Kids these days with their papyrus scrolls…”2. Plato (sort of continuing Socrates)
He argued that written language would lead to shallow understanding vs. living dialogue.
Plato feared technology would degrade the soul’s relationship to truth.
Ironically… we know this because Plato wrote it down.
3. The Medieval Church (15th century) — Against the Printing Press
Leaders feared mass printing would:
• spread heresy
• destabilize authority
• create too many opinions
• encourage the “uneducated” to think for themselves
They were… not wrong.
4. The 18th & 19th Century Romantic Poets (Wordsworth, Blake, etc.)
They feared industrial machines would:
• crush nature
• destroy the human spirit
• turn people into cogs
Blake literally wrote about “dark Satanic mills.”
5. The Luddites (1811–1816)
Actual textile workers who smashed early industrial factory machines.
Not anti-technology per se — they feared technology owned by capital replacing skilled labor and dignity.
This one was more “class-war alarm” than “the robots will eat our souls.”
6. Henry David Thoreau (mid-19th century)
Railroads, telegraphs, and industrial society:
His view: “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”
Translation: technology changes us more than we change it.
7. Leo Tolstoy (late 19th century)
Hated industrial modernity.
Saw it as a betrayal of spiritual life in favor of materialism.
Wanted simplicity, manual labor, and spiritual clarity.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche (late 19th century)
Distrust of mechanization and bureaucratic modernity.
Feared mass culture would crush individual greatness.
Would have loathed Twitter.
9. Martin Heidegger (1950s)
One of the most influential modern critics of technology.
Feared that technology makes us view everything (including humans) as resources to be optimized.
That one… hits hard today.
10. Jacques Ellul (1954) — The Technological Society
Argued that once a technology exists, society becomes shaped around it, not the other way around.
Efficiency becomes the god.
Influenced basically every thoughtful critic afterward.
11. Neil Postman (1980s–1990s)
Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Television and mass media, he said, would turn politics and knowledge into entertainment.
He predicted the rise of spectacle-based politics with terrifying accuracy.
12. Jaron Lanier (2000s–present)
Early VR pioneer turned tech-skeptic.
Critic of digital platforms, attention extraction, and “flattened identity.”
More “gentle warning” than doom.
13. And yes… Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) (deeply problematic but relevant)
His manifesto argued industrial technological expansion would eliminate human autonomy.