Technology for Saving Time

My new thing is to listen to Danish radio in the morning in the hope that it will improve my Danish language listening skills. At the moment I can only pick up the odd word in each sentence, but there was an interview (in English) with Prem Rawat that caught my ear, which included this:

I think we are really out of touch with ourselves. We’re in touch with everything else: this account, and that account, and our phones. Things that were supposed to save us us time may or may not save time, but they definitely occupy that free time we were promised.

Prem Rawat on DRP1’s Sproglaboratoriet

This reminded me of something Mark Steel said when he was on The Infinite Monkey Cage show. He reckoned that the problems lie with the “social mechanisms” that employ the science, rather than the science itself:

In the early 1970s, there were two things that we were promised … One was that space travel would go on and on, and by now we’d certainly be on Mars. But the other thing was that new technology would mean that we would have this crisis of having so much leisure, because everything would done by machinery … what on earth do we do with all the time? As we know, the average working week now in Britain is longer than it was back then.

Mark Steel on BBC Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage Series 2 Ep. 4