Not too long ago my Grandson Nicky at age 9 resisted revealing to his mother the password to his computer.

"If I do that," he objected, "you will take away my apps." Apparently Nicky considered the technology dwelling inside his machine to be his friend, while his mom was not so sure about that.

The dispute concerning the way that technology can serve human needs or harm us has been around a very long time.

Regardless of stories told by myth, literature and history that warn us to beware of technical progress, this march is an inescapable feature of the human condition.

In Greek mythology Prometheus starts the ball rolling when he steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity. This is the first step on the road of progress that leads to human civilization. There is, however, an unintended consequences to the gift giving of fire . The Olympian gods bound the fire giver to a rock where each day an eagle was sent to feed on his liver, which would then grow back to be eaten each day.

Mary Shelley, who wrote the novel Frankenstein in 1818 subtitled her book The Modern Prometheus. Her story makes the point that efforts to improve the human condition could also result in tragedy.

In the same century the Luddites were textile workers who protested against newly developed labor-saving machinery.

Machines such as spinning frames and power looms it was feared would replace artisans with less skilled low wage laborers, leaving them without work.

The British government assisted the march of technical progress when it passed the Frame Breaking Act.

This made industrial sabotage a capital crime. Some of the machine busting Luddite protestors were harshly punished by deportation and some by execution.

The fear of technology continued to grow as a result of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

This unease, however , did not stem the tide of technical development spurred on by the profit motive and perceived security needs.

At the same time, production of war technologies such as napalm, so called smart bombs, and defoliation chemicals such as Agent Orange, during the Vietnam war further undermined public confidence in technology's worth and purpose.

Later, the environmental movement emerged as a warning concerning the consequences of technical advances which stimulated increasing industrial and transportation activity. The first international air pollution conference was held in 1955. In the 1980s the depletion of the ozone layer and the threat of global warming loomed large.

With the coming of the digital age, the processing and transmission of information pushed the tide of technology exponentially in ways that neither the story tellers of Greek mythology, nor Luddite artisan protestors, nor Mary Shelly, nor the opponents of weapons of mass destruction, nor the environmentalists, could have dreamed.

Most of us, like my grandson, are firmly attached to the apps that wrap us in a World Wide Web of useful information, instant communication, and mind pleasing entertainment.

Yet, just as Prometheus did not anticipate the punishment of the gods, we do not often consider that in some ways the unintended consequences of our being wedded to the digital age may be just as painful as the pecking of the eagle at the fire giver's liver.

The art of conversation has in some cases been atrophied to spurts limited to 140 characters.

A nearly infinite mass of information confounds our capacity to sort out the meaningful from the meaningless. The smart phone may be smarter than we are.

The capacity to text distracts drivers and cause the deaths of 11 teenagers every day.

Young people are seduced into sending pictures of themselves that would have embarrassed Hugh Hefner, as well as seeking revenge on each other by transmitting scenes of their former lovers sexual activities.

Cyber bullying has caused too many suicides.

The march of technology will continue at a mind boggling rate and there are many obvious benefits. Yet at the same time, we as individuals need to avoid blindly accepting technical progress as human progress.

We need, as my grandson eventually did when he let his mother look at his apps, to let our mother of common sense let us use what helps us and whenever possible avoid what hurts us.

Greek mythology tells us that Icarus attempted to escape from Crete by flying with wings of feathers and wax constructed by his father Daedalus. Sadly, he ignored instructions not to fly too close to the sun and the melting wax caused him to fall into the sea where he drowned. The point of the myth is that it was hubris and failed ambition that brought Icarus down. And for us -- Is our blind acceptance of technology causing us to fly too close to the sun?