The core source for the idea is his essay The Question Concerning Technology (1954).

Heidegger’s argument is subtle. He does not mainly think technology is dangerous because machines become powerful. He thinks the deeper danger is that human beings begin to see everything — nature, other people, and eventually themselves — as resources to be optimized, ordered, and used.

One of his key terms is “standing-reserve” (Bestand). Under technological thinking:

• a forest becomes “timber inventory”
• a river becomes “hydroelectric potential”
• a worker becomes “human resources”
• even a person’s attention or personality becomes something measurable and manageable

So the irony is:

• machines can seem increasingly adaptive, responsive, or “alive”
• while humans increasingly behave according to systems, routines, metrics, and procedures

That’s probably why your remembered quote feels Heideggerian.

A famous genuine Heidegger passage says:

“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”

Meaning: the real issue isn’t gadgets themselves, but a whole way of seeing the world.

Another important idea in the essay is “enframing” (Gestell), Heidegger’s term for the mindset that organizes reality into calculable, controllable units. In an enframed world, spontaneity, mystery, contemplation, and individuality tend to shrink.

This connects strongly to a lot of 20th-century literature and film:

• Modern Times — humans reduced to machine rhythms
• The Trial — impersonal systems dominating individuals
• Player Piano
• 2001: A Space Odyssey — the machine appears calm and rational while humans become helpless or procedural
• Brazil — bureaucracy becoming absurdly mechanical

There’s also an interesting tension in Heidegger: he was not simply anti-technology or nostalgic for the past. He thought technology revealed something real about the human desire for mastery and certainty. The danger was that this mode of thinking could become so dominant that we forget there are other ways of relating to reality — art, contemplation, ritual, poetry, direct experience.

That’s why he often turns toward poets like Friedrich Hölderlin late in his work. Poetry, for Heidegger, preserves a less mechanical relationship to being.