Karel Capek and the problem with letting the market solve your problems....

I just finished R.U.R., Capek's most famous play, and the work of literature that introduced the word "robot" into the world vocabulary.  The second act of the play shows mankind being slowly overwhelmed by the very technology they thought was serving them.  The last survivors (ironically those who ran the company that produced the robots that destroyed humanity) are arguing about who was responsible.  In a remarkably prescient speech one of the characters (his name is Busman) points out the smoking gun-

"My, you are naïve.  No doubt you think that the plant director controls production?  Not at all.  Demand controls production.  The whole world wanted its Robots.  My boy, we did nothing but ride the avalanche of demand, and all the while kept blathering on--about technology, about the social question, about progress, about very interesting things.  As though this rhetoric of ours could somehow direct the course of the thing.  And all the while the whole mess picked up speed under its own weight, faster, faster, still faster--and every beastly, profiteering order added another pebble to the avalanche.  And there you have it folks."

Busman puts his finger right on the problem with a society that knowingly allows its prime organizing feature to be the market:

"history is not made by great dreams, but by the petty wants of all respectable, moderately thievish, and selfish people, i.e., of everyone.  All our ideas, loves, plans, heroic ideals, all of those lofty things are worthless."