Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention
from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an
end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to
Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph
from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important
to communicate... As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk
sensibly... After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does
not carry the most important messages.

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-- Henry David Thoreau
(Walden, 1854)