This is in the tradition of the critique of modernity, which holds that mankind is losing something of great value along with our technical progress. It is a minority tradition - like a dissenting opinion in a court case - and has been pretty well drowned out by now. A notable figure in this tradition is the French thinker Simone Weil, who combined intellectual rigor and spiritual depth in a particularly compelling way.
It's probably apropos that you posted this in an article about George Dyson, since Dyson's theme is uncovering the origins and recesses of that technical progress, but very much from within the modern view.
I love Eliot. His English is exquisite, especially his diction, which is incomparable. Everything he wrote seems to be in a state of timeless balance. This quote turns out to be from a play called The Rock (1934):
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
That's really something. He's talking about modernity, but in a way that reads like a translation from Sanskrit, with something of the Greek chorus about it as well. Here's someone trying to get perspective on the present through the language of the past. I never thought of that before.
I assume you mean what does that tradition speak of? Pretty much what Eliot says in the quote.
There's a positive and a negative aspect to the critique, in the sense of what it posits vs. what it negates. The positive aspect argues that the Good is accessible through something other than Reason. They're not against Reason, but see it as only part of man's heritage and not the most important part at that. This leads to a critique of modernity because, they argue, modernity doesn't acknowledge or allow for such knowing.
The negative aspect argues that by regarding everything as a technical problem, man becomes swept away by relativism, sees himself as the source of all values, and ultimately lacks any basis for knowing what is good. In this view, rational humanism is shallow and self-deceptive and Nietzsche, the prophet of man choosing his own values, is the great distiller of modernity, the one who took it to its logical conclusion. But where Nietzsche professes to celebrate that conclusion, people like Eliot and Weil and George Grant see it as a reductio.
An interesting thing about the thinkers in this tradition is that for a counterpoint to the Enlightenment view of man (which they reject for its triumphalist emphasis on Reason) they turn not to the anti-Enlightenment Romantics but rather to antiquity, before the split between Reason and Spirit (to use old-fashioned terms) occurred. You can hear this in the Eliot quote. Weil's lodestones were the Iliad and Plato. She, by the way, was the younger sister of André Weil. That was one amazing family.
I'm going to do a bad job of explaining what I think the value of this quote is, but here's what I thought upon reading it: He's not asking for the technical difference between consulting a phone and having the phone direct you, but in a deeper sense (I guess maybe of some false depth, according to some), posing the question of where the line is crossed before which computers are simply tools used by humans and beyond which computers/technology in general must be considered a separate entity or life-form of some kind.
I think the "giving directions" example was sort of a poor choice, because people will think "yeah, a GPS 'commands' you, but it isn't actually 'commanding', it's simply information delivered in a command-like format so that you don't have to interact with it while driving". I think this was simply supposed to be an example of a more general philosophical question of at what point do we program-in such layers of thought, abstraction, problem-solving, etc. into technology that the resulting intelligence cannot be considered anything but another form of life (you could argue that as it exists right now, it is a very primitive version of that).
Even in the GPS example, it's not a poor choice. What if there are places you decide to visit or not visit, based on the availability of GPS? For example, exploring a new city in your car; if I didn't have my iPhone so I could search interesting locations (where the definition of "interesting" is not up to me) and find directions for them immediately, I probably wouldn't go through the trouble of exploring in a lot of cases. So even with this example, it's already not clear who is "commanding" who.
This touches on an ethical problem that is also briefly mentioned in the book "Programming by Demonstration," which I think restates the problem in the best way:
"In any case, I think the most important issues regarding end-user programming and its subbranch of programming by example are pedagogical and ethical. There is no question that a human with a goal wants to have the sub-goals ready made and at hand. One shouldn't have to learn about Carnot cycles of internal combustion engines--or even just hand cranking it--in order to drive an automobile. And agents that can be told goals and can go off and solve them have been valuable and sought after for as long as humanity has endured.
On the other hand, it takes a very special value system for children and adults to be able to exist as learning creatures--indeed as humans at all--in the presence of an environment that does all for them. 20th century humans that don't understand the hows and whys of their technologies are not in a position to make judgments and shape futures. At some point it is necessary to understand something about thermodynamics and waiting until then to try to learn it doesn't work. Nature's rule is "use it or lose it"--most social systems that have incorporated intelligent slaves or amanuenses have "lost it". In fact most never gained it to lose. In a technopoly in which we can make just about anything we desire, and almost everything we do can be replaced with vicarious experience, we have to decide to do the activities that make us into actualized humans. We have to decide to exercise, to not eat too much fat and sugar, to learn, to read, to explore, to experiment, to make, to love, to think. In short, to exist.
Difficulties are annoying and we like to remove them. But we have to be careful to only remove the gratuitous ones. As for the others--those whose surmounting makes us grow stronger in mind and body--we have to decide to leave those in and face them."
T.S. Eliot, 1934