"The rationality of the many generations of scientists who spent their energy in perfecting the Machine and making it more and more powerful and autonomous, triumphed in extending its control over what is, by nature, irrational, until, little by little, mechanical muscles and "electronic" cells replaced almost completely the physical and mental functions of human beings, expropriating them of their human prerogatives. So, at the time of the story, not only have they become so weakened as not to be able to pick up what they drop unless the floor raises it back to them, but they are also incapable of original thought. Music, literature, even poetry are produced exclusively by "electronic" devices. In their blind enthusiasm for scientific discoveries human beings have exceeded the limits allowed to them by nature and provoked the trespassing of the mechanical into the human; so the Machine, that stupendous and tangible testimony to human intellect, almost perfect in its capacity for autoregulation and autoregeneration, has gradually and inadvertently deprived human existence of all significance, negating it almost completely in the pale and inept beings that are entirely dependent now on its obscure and omnipresent power."