Mr. Theo Dorgan:

The false idea of progress as represented by the machine world is far more insidious and dangerous than we grant it. The late, great Michael Hartnett said, thinking of that kind of progress, "poets with progress make no peace or pact; the act of poetry is a rebel act". The former holder of the Ireland Professor of Poetry chair, Paula Meehan, said recently that the machines had begun to groom us. The machines are teaching us to think in simplistic, binary terms. We are adjusting our patterns of behaviour or ways of being in the world with the simplistic algorithms of our iPhones, iPads and small machines. That is not what being human is about.