It would seem that Pixar's Wall-E took more than a little inspiration from The Machine Stops. The ending of the original is better, since it acknowledges the universality of decay. The ship in Wall-E, the Axiom (the rough analog to The Machine) is in excellent shape even after 700 years, and long since any living human knew anything about how it works. A rosy picture indeed! But The Machine is wordless, humming, utterly inhuman, and it decays in the end. Interesting that the mechanisms that compose Axiom are all sentient and expressive and individual - a hallmark of Pixar's "anthropomorphize all the things!" approach to story-telling. But the central theme about human dependency on technology is exactly the same.
I wonder if humanity could/should have its cake and eat it to. Imagine a world where different communities intentionally live at different technology levels. At the lowest level, you don't have electricity, just man- and animal-power. At the mid-level, you have steam engines and electricity, but no computers. At the high-level you have everything. Ideally one could choose which level to live at, perhaps at the coming-of-age. The nice thing about such a civilization is that it's resiliant to damage - for example, a Carrington event (e.g. massive solar flare) might destroy the high-level civ, damage the medium-level civ, but leave the low-level civ untouched. There might even be instructions/commitment/duty for civs to rebuild each other after disaster. (I believe we badly overestimate our ability to "drop down" a tech level in an emergency; such lifestyles must be maintained by practice.)
I wonder if humanity could/should have its cake and eat it to. Imagine a world where different communities intentionally live at different technology levels. At the lowest level, you don't have electricity, just man- and animal-power. At the mid-level, you have steam engines and electricity, but no computers. At the high-level you have everything. Ideally one could choose which level to live at, perhaps at the coming-of-age. The nice thing about such a civilization is that it's resiliant to damage - for example, a Carrington event (e.g. massive solar flare) might destroy the high-level civ, damage the medium-level civ, but leave the low-level civ untouched. There might even be instructions/commitment/duty for civs to rebuild each other after disaster. (I believe we badly overestimate our ability to "drop down" a tech level in an emergency; such lifestyles must be maintained by practice.)