Technology has made us safer both directly and indirectly. Further, by replacing brute force with electronics and machinery, technology has made us more efficient and tremendously increased our productivity. Ask most any writer where he would be without his word processor a device not incidentally blamed for cancer, miscarriages, and cataracts despite the utter lack of evidence. A more productive society is a wealthier and hence healthier society. More money means catalytic convertors, smokestack scrubbers, air bags, treated sewage, more food, better health care, and so on.
Technophobia is by no means new.
The 1950s were filled with monster movies about science run amok and creating giant women, ants, spiders, lizards, praying mantises, and the like. Some of us recall the fluoride hysteria that began about half a century ago when towns began fluoridating their water supply. In one such town, the local health office received citizen complaints that fluoridated water was discoloring their saucepans, that it was giving them digestive troubles. All of these complaints came in before the city actually began to fluoridate. The difference between then and now is that back then, if you wanted to spread the word that fluoride was a communist plot, you were generally relegated to insignificant, small-circulation journals.