Good machine and bad

"When we deal with a machine, there are three things we want to know: how much can it do, how fast can it do it, and with what degree of precision. These qualities summarise what distinguishes a good machine from a bad one: it is more productive, faster and more precise than a less good one. However, changes in scale, speed and precision in the real world all change the quality of the experience, and the ways in which we interact with one another: increasing them no longer gives a clearly positive outcome – it can be very damaging. In human affairs, increasing the amount or extent of something, or the speed with which something happens, or the inflexible precision with which it is conceived or applied, can actually destroy. But since the left hemisphere is the hemisphere of What, quantity would be the only criterion that it would understand. The right hemisphere's appreciation of How (quality) would be lost. As a result considerations of quantity might come actually to replace considerations of quality altogether, and without the majority of people being aware that anything had happened." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 430). 

'More is better' yields a mechanical world where the productive realm becomes stilted and loses its fluidity. 

"In a society dominated by technology, Berger and colleagues predict what they refer to as: 'mechanisticity', which means the development of a system that permits things to be reproduced endlessly, and enforces submergence of the individual in a large organization or production line; 'measurability', in other words the insistence on quantification, not qualification; 'componentiality', that is to say reality reduced to self-contained units, so that 'everything is analysable into constituent components, and everything can be taken apart and put together again in terms of these components'; and an 'abstract frame of reference', in other words loss of context." (Ibid).