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Anders' book is a passionate and colorful picture of man caught up in the dynamics of the Second Industrial Revolution, climaxed by the manufacture of the all-destructive Bomb. His main argument might be paraphrased as saying that “the thinking” of the machine is outstripping the thinking of man, and that as man is less and less able to regulate this Frankenstein, he is becoming more and more obsolete.
Man can make the Bomb, but cannot control what it does. The tool is no longer what it was for Prometheus; rather man has become the servant of his own tool, is succumbing to things. When Emerson spoke of things riding mankind, these “things” had not become mathematical phantoms, unknown and unpredictable. When in the Marxist framework, ownership of the machine was seen as endangering the worker, today its very existence endangers all of mankind, makes it an automatically ultimate weapon, whether it is in the hands of an imperialist nation or in those of a St. Francis. Compared to its menace, the clash of political systems is secondary.
The chapter on Radio and Television illustrates Anders'