The most striking feature of technology change over a lifetime is not that machines have become faster. It is that activities once requiring patience, specialist knowledge and several people can now be performed, often imperfectly, by one person with a telephone in his pocket. For someone who began work when a long-distance call had to be booked, export papers were typed in multiple copies and a wrong figure could mean starting a page again, the scale of the alteration is hard to overstate.
There is a temptation to treat this as a simple march of progress. Much has plainly improved. Communication is quicker, information is more widely available and many formerly laborious tasks are cheaper. Yet every gain brings a different dependency. The question is not whether technology is good or bad. It is whether we remain capable of judging when it helps, when it misleads and when an older, slower method is the wiser one.