Now it seemed that this had been a self-sustained illusion he had nourished carefully to bolster a sense of his own importance. - Clifford D. Simak

The robots are not technologically minded. They were not built to be. They were built to bolster human vanity and pride, to meet a strange longing that seems to be built into the human ego—the need to have other humans (or a reasonable facsimile of other humans) to minister to our wants and needs, human slaves to be dominated, human beings over which a man or woman (or a child) can assert authority, thus building up a false feeling of superiority.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

The old and the young, he thought. The old, who do not care; the young, who do not think.