The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.

Gabor contrasts earlier technological ambitions—meeting basic material needs or fulfilling deep-seated human desires—with a newer, more sobering agenda: repairing harm created by prior innovations. The line anticipates modern “externalities” thinking, where progress generates pollution, resource depletion, social disruption, and new risks that then demand further technical and political responses. Implicitly, it questions the idea of linear, unqualified progress: technology becomes partly self-referential, forced to clean up after itself. The quote also carries an ethical challenge: inventors and societies should account for long-term consequences, not merely immediate utility or novelty, and should prioritize restorative and preventive work alongside invention.