A brain in a bottle

The function of the machine is to save work. In a fully mechanized world all the dull drudgery will be done by machinery, leaving us free for more interesting pursuits. So expressed, this sounds splendid. But presently the question arises, what else are we to do? Supposedly we are set free from "work" in order that we may do something which is not "work." But what is work and what is not work? There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them. The labourer set free from digging may want to spend his leisure, or part of it, in playing the piano, while the professional pianist may be only too glad to get out and dig at the potato patch. The truth is that when a human being is not eating, drinking, sleeping, making love, talking, playing games, or merely lounging about -and these things will not fill up a lifetime- he needs work and usually looks for it, though he may not call it work.
For man is not a kind of walking stomach; he has also got a hand, an eye, and a brain. Cease to use your hands, and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your consciousness. And now consider a half-dozen men who were digging a trench for a water-pipe. A machine has set them free from digging, and they are going to amuse themselves with something else -carpentering, for instance. But whatever they want to do, they will find that another machine has set them free from that. For in a fully mechanized world there would be no more need to carpenter, to cook, to mend motor bicycles, etc., than there would be to dig. There is scarcely anything that could not conceivably be done by machinery. Mechanize the world as fully as it might be mechanized, and whichever may you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working -that is of living.
The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation. It makes unnecessary and even impossible the activities of the eye and the hand. Why, for instance, use your hands at all -why use them even for blowing your nose or sharpening a pencil? Surely you could fix some kind of steel and rubber contraption to your shoulders and let your arms wither into stumps of skin and bone? And so with every organ and every faculty. There is really no reason why a human being should do more than eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and procreate; everything else could be done for him by machinery. Therefore the logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle.

- George ORWELL, The Road to Wigan Pier, (1937)