I just stumbled across this New Yorker article from 2007. The discovery and X-ray scanning of the Antikythera Mechanism highlights the French sociologist Jacques Ellul's argument that our modern relationship with technology is fundamentally different from how man has encountered technology in the past--that the ancient Greeks possessed a much more developed technological capacity then we are aware and simultaneously understood a critical danger in its application and exerted self-mastery to limit its control over their lives and society. If this is the case, then perhaps it is no accident that we have almost no knowledge of the Greek's seemingly sophisticated level of technological development. Likewise, it is a call for us to consider how we harness our technology, or to what extent our technology has totally enslaved us.
From the New Yorker article:
"The Greeks are thought to have possessed crude wooden gears, which were used to lift heavy building materials, haul up water, and hoist anchors, but historians do not generally credit them with possessing scientifically precise gears—gears cut from metal and arranged into complex “gear trains” capable of carrying motion from one driveshaft to another. Paul Keyser, a software developer at I.B.M. and the author of “Greek Science of the Hellenistic Era,” told me recently, “Those scholars who study the history of science tend to focus on science beginning with Copernicus and Galileo and Harvey, and often go so far as to assert that no such thing existed before.” It’s almost as if we wished to reserve advanced technological accomplishment exclusively for ourselves. Our civilization, while too late to make the fundamental discoveries that the Greeks made in the sciences—Euclidean geometry, trigonometry, and the law of the lever, to name a few—has excelled at using those discoveries to make machines. These are the product and proof of our unique genius, and we’re reluctant to share our glory with previous civilizations...
...But, if the Greeks did have greater technological sophistication than we think they did, why didn’t they apply it to making more useful things—time- and work-saving machines, for example—instead of elaborate singing automatons? Or is what we consider important about technology—which is, above all, that it is useful—different from what the Greeks considered worthwhile: amusement, enlightenment, delight for its own sake? According to one theory, the Greeks, because they owned slaves, had little incentive to invent labor-saving devices—indeed, they may have found the idea distasteful. Archimedes’ claws notwithstanding, there was, as Keyser notes, cultural resistance to making high-tech war machines, because “both the Greeks and the Romans valued individual bravery in war.” In any case, in the absence of any obvious practical application for Greek technology, it is easy to believe that it never existed at all.
From Jacques Ellul's book, The Technological Society:
"The Greeks, however, were the first to have a coherent scientific activity and to liberate scientific thought. But then a phenomenon occurred which still astonishes historians: the almost total separation of science and technique. Doubtless, this separation was less absolute than the example of Archimedes has led historians to believe. But it is certain that material needs were treated with contempt, that technical research was considered unworthy of the intellect, and that the goal of science was not application but contemplation. Plato shunned any compromise with application, even in order to forward scientific research. For him, only the most abstract possible exercise of reason was important. Archimedes went even further. True, he rationalized practice and even made 'applications' to a certain degree; but his machine was to be destroyed after it had demonstrated the exactness of his numerical reckonings.
"In their golden age of science, the Greeks could have deduced the technical consequences of their scientific activity. But they did not wish too. Walter asks: "Did the Greeks, obsessed with harmony, check themselves at the very point at which inquiry ran the risk of going to excess and threatened to introduce a monstrosity into their civilization?
"This was the result if a variety of factors, most of which were of a philosophic nature. For on thing, theirs was a conception of life which scorned material needs and the improvement of practical life, discredited manual labor (because of the practice of slavery), held contemplation to be the goal of intellectual activity because it represented an aspect of brute force and implied a want of moderation. Man, however humble his technical equipment, has from the very beginning played the role of sorcerer's apprentice in relation to the machine. This feeling on the part of the Greeks was not a reflection of a primitive man's fear in the face of something he does not understand (the explanation given today when certain persons take fright at our techniques). Rather, it was the result, perfectly mastered and perfectly measured, of a certain conception of life. It represented an apex of civilization and intelligence.
"Here we find the supreme Greek virtue, ἐγκράτεια (self control). The rejection of technique was a deliberate, positive activity involving self-mastery, recognition of destiny, and the application of a given conception of life. Only the most modest techniques were permitted--those which would respond directly to material needs in such a way that these needs did not get the upper hand."
A reconstruction of the Antikythera mechanism by Michael Wright:
