Technology; is it serving us or have we become slaves of technology?

The trouble I believe started when the ancients started working on ways to install sanitary facilities inside their homes. Think of it this way, a small village or community could only grow in size to the point where the guy living in the centre start to have to travel an uncomfortable distance to the bush outside of town to do his business. When people successfully started installing toilets with sewage systems in their dwellings, villages could become towns and then cities and eventualy,the large endless metropolises we are so used to today.
This in turn made it necessary to create the wheel to help with the transport of goods and services over the ever growing distances covered inside cities.
Inventing the wheel meant that a whole string of inventions had to follow in order to make the wheel function properly and safely. Roads needed to be constructed and as soon as the roads were filled with enough wheels, ways needed to be developed in order to regulate this hoard of wheels otherwise they will keep on crashing into each other.
It was not long before people felt the wheel was going to slow and animals had to be trained to pull the wheels around and eventually the steam engine followed by the internal combustion engine.
Now at the start you hauled what you could carry on your back and off you went! Dog-work you might say and that only to cover a short distance at a time being able to carry only very small loads. Today we are working like dogs to build cars, roads, dig for oil and to maintain and service all this so called high tech advances in order that we can free our selves from carrying around goods on our backs.
The question is; was the amount of goods we were carrying at the start so much that we are willing to work so hard and invest so much energy, resources and time into a system doing the carrying for us when we only needed to transport some food, clothing and every now and again a bit of building material, most of which can be produced and manufactured right in the area where you live.
I am sure that if everyone who's day job is directly or indirectly involved in the making of cars, trucks or other forms of transport and keeping it all going, stop what they are doing and put a small comfortable load on their back to move it a comfortable distance in one day they would have been under less stress and would have been able to move double the amount of goods over the same distance.
The question is; is technology serving us or have we become slaves in order to keep it going?
We are fully aware that our unquenching consumption of goods are making a few of us extremely wealthy and powerful and some of us slightly content but only because we think we have a good life because of the false conveniences the poorly made and unreliable "high tech" gadgets offer us, and that this uncontrolled consumption is exploiting most of us and leaving millions hungry and devoid of their land and human dignity.

All this might be very simplified but you should get the picture.
If we are ready to move into the next step of human evolution we will have to prepare ourselves to get of the "high tech" buzz we have been on for the last 100 or so years and we will have to look at ways to use technology in a simplified way to become extensions of what we need to have done and not the other way around where we have become extensions for technology to keep on evolving.
Automation is a farce and an unrealistic dream, people will never be able to free themselves from the burden of hard work, "By the sweat of your brow, you will produce food to eat until you return to the ground, because you were taken from it. You are dust, and you will return to dust." GEN 3:19
To automate something only means that you are shifting the focus of the work at hand as your luxury to do your washing with a machine keeps many at the backbreaking job of mining minerals to produce steel from which parts of a washing machine can be made and transported all over the planet to be manufactured in the east and consumed in the west and later dumped in the backyard of a small banana republic sold out by its leaders to the wealthy West.
Some might say cellphones is convenient and have saved many lives, I say cellphones have been responsible for far more deaths and its convenience is starting to get a new perspective when your clients can reach you even while you are sitting on the toilet doing your daily business.