Technology or Labour!!!

Hi
Just a few days back i had discussion with a friend of mine over who drives whom?Whether is it Technology driving the labor or is the labor driving of technology?To make it simple was iPod a result of technology or labor.Now this is a topic which has been raised since time of industrial revolution.People saw upon technology as the one which will take their jobs away and will cause unprecedented levels of unemployment.There can be many arguments in favor of each side.
The proponents of technology will always put the point that technology is the one which is driving the world towards evolution,making way for more technological revolution,making life of humans easier etc.On the business side they can raise multiple arguments like technology has driven business.It is the technology that drives companies towards success and the ones which continuously improve on technology are the most successful.There might be a dearth of arguments in favor of technology in this passage since i am putting the ones which my feeble mind can collate at this time.So there is scope of many more such arguments.
I might sound a proponent of labor driving market rather than technology driving market.So there is always going to be some level of inclination towards the first point in this blog.
Kicking off the discussion i will like to take up the business perspective.I strongly believe it is the labor who drives the market and market which drives technology.Though technology has blurred the boundaries and made the world flat but how was this possible? Was this a case where we just came up with some technology and then we place that technology and it finds its consumers ? Or is it that one highly intelligent person came up with a desire to make this postal department run for money?This dude found severe bottleneck in transmitting his information to his friends so he thought of something like a telephone by which he can send his messages to all his people instantly.But then this telephone was also badly impaired and he wanted to remove this telephone and thought something else and then something else and like this the things kept on growing.What i am reflecting on at this point is that there was a need a customer for the technology who created that technology.Though the technology found its customer since many people wanted the same technology only they were not clear what they wanted but once this thing came up they had this light of enlightenment which struck them and they found it is very important for them.
I can also infer at this point that in the above example that here the consumer was the labor.The same person who used it was its creator so this is a cycle.
Like a farmer who grows wheat sells it to the market and again buys flour from the market . The farmer is the consumer and the producer.Only there are a few middle man who are smarter than this farmer who take his thing from him add value (or may not add value ) to his product and sell it back to him.These are the capitalists/industrialists.
So at every moment it is the labor who drove the market and if the labor does not need it the technology fails.Citing couple of examples like the pager in India.This product never clicked in India.There are many reasons for this mobile phones made them obsolete , no service which could facilitate pagers to develop etc.But i also feel that the need for pager was never felt in the Indian market.When the pager was launched in India it was targeted to the niche class segment,but subsequent to its launch we had the mobiles too which entered the market.The people started flirting with the idea of having a mobile than a pager while in US still a pager has its market . Now mobiles could capture the market since it met the requirements of the people more comprehensively than a pager.Here one more point we can infer is that the labor is not directly involved in creation of the mobile but indirectly,since he is the one who works in other industries and it was he who helped in rise of the mobile market.So every moment labor should be satisfied for a industrialist to make money ; though this is what i feel.Second example is from Dell where in they developed a product "Olympic" which could make immense impact to market but sadly they had to scrap the product as Micheal Dell states in "Direct From Dell".This certainly gave a lesson that you never build a technology and the sell it but first see its requirement and then sell it.
Many a times this case is being put that iPod is a technology that has created a market of its own.I would disagree here since iPod targets one major requirement of people their need to listen to music on the move.And in that perspective we can see that the Sony Walkman was also a instant hit since it provided people with the option to listen as they move.And for the same reason we have these hundreds of mobile phones with inbuilt mp3 player , fm etc flooding in the market do find customer.I regard the reason for iPods success was its first mover advantage .
May be i might not be correct.But it is my perspective that it is always the user( read as labor) who drives the technology and not the vice versa.