The lesson is instructive. If the physical identity of a person, i.e.what makes him or her physically different from (say) a roundworm, is rooted in something so small (a virtually indistinguishable variation in a strand of acid), how much more fragile is her or his social and psychological identity?

It is time that we realized that our human existence ashuman beings is largely a construct, neither immutable nor eternal. It is true that human nature and the basic parameters of our lives have remained the same for thousands of years. We are born, and we die, we laugh, cry, love, hate, fight, plant, eat, drink, bleed and procreate, and the same was true for our parents and their parents before them.

On the other hand, our response to these basic realities is subject to great change. All over the world, people create rituals, codes, customs, rules, structures, thoughts, traditions and celebrations. All over the world, these are different. When they align well with our daily realities, they make us stronger and happier. When they align poorly, they confuse or even harm us.

The problem with technology is that it is commonly used to alter the basic parameters themselves (although this does not need to be true). In the last century alone, technology changed the way people traveled, how they talked, how they thought, how they ate, how they woke up, how they went to sleep, how they were born, how they died, and even how they were (or were not) conceived.

Furthermore, technological progress experiences exponential growth. This means that its influence over people will continue to grow, at an ever increasing rate.

This has several major consequences:

• When the basic human parameters are altered, it invalidates all the rituals, traditions and social structures that formed in response to the old parameters. Since such things form slowly, over long periods of time, they cannot be changed effectively in haste. We are rapidly approaching a time of crisis where no human response can keep pace with the evolution of technology.

• Although technology has many benefits, the impact of changing basic parameters has largely been negative. There is a clear push towards making human beings more standardized, more interchangeable, more obedient to rigid schedules and straight lines, more mutable and less self-reliant (standardized tests, alarm clocks, city streets, plastic surgery/designer genetics, calculators). In effect, human beings are becoming products, identified with serial numbers and magnetic strips.

• From a psychological viewpoint, machines are becoming more important than people, because they have a greater impact. Faced with the increasing capacity of ever-shinier computers, people respond with a learned helplessness culminating in psychological dependence.