. . . but Gay is not above belaboring the point

From a review of three books, As a God Might Be: Three Visions of Technological Progress by Meghan O’Gieblyn. O’Gieblyn has this passing aside.

No exception is Malcolm Gay’s The Brain Electric: The Dramatic High-Tech Race to Merge Man and Machine, which traces the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), electrodes surgically implanted in the brain. In an early chapter, Gay looks to history to assure us that BCIs are merely the latest instance of a very old trend: “In some essential sense, we’ve been enmeshing our lives with tools ever since Homo sapiens emerged from the hominid line some 200,000 years ago.”

Gay recalls the development of eyeglasses, pens, the spear, and the wheel—technologies all, lest we forget—noting that humanity resisted each of them. Writing was once feared as the scourge of civilization; the printing press was met with great hue and cry. The moral of the story is self-evident, but Gay is not above belaboring the point.