1933 World's Fair motto: "SCIENCE FINDS - INDUSTRY APPLIES - MAN CONFORMS." Do you believe this is generally true?

I think that would have been easy to believe in 1933, but in the longer run technology ends up saying to us "have it your way". At first it's hard to get the tech to even work, and people have to fit themselves to what the tech can do. But over time tech gets better and cheaper, and more and more it gets designed around how people would like to use it, rather than the limitations of how it can work.Example... with computers you first had to learn to use keyboards and command line interfaces.

Then they moved on to mice and touchpads. Now we're seeing touchscreens where that makes sense, and voice recognition starting to play a bigger role. As time goes by the tech moves towards what is easier and more natural for people.

Now imagine the same thing with the tech involved in washing your clothes or cooking your dinner, and how that has changed over the last 150 years. Did people want to cook and clean that way in the past, or is that all the tech of the time could do? We don't "conform" to microwaves and food processors and such, they come to conform to what we want.

All these tech changes do have a large impact on people and society of course. But the negative aspects of those effects are more along the lines of "be careful what you wish for" than being forced to conform with something inhuman. In the 1930s, it wouldn't have looked that way, but that was cos many technologies and industries were at a relatively early and crude stage.

See here for more info on these ideas: mitpress.mit.edu/books/NORVH/chapter2.html.