Rainbows End Art and Culture Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #10

"Imagine soft pinky robot hands, patiently picking over all the libraries and museums of the world. They'll be cross-checking, scanning for annotations—giving whole new generations of academic types like Zulfi Sharif something to hang their degrees on." (34.68)

This is Tommie imagining future Chinese scanning projects. We can't help but notice that Tommie (the techie) imagines that technology will lead the way and change culture. That is, we get scans and digital archives and then we get the academic papers and degrees. Is he right, do you think? Does technology lead culture?