This essay gave me entirely different perspective of things. Great essay! Here's my two cents.
If we were to have a ranking of senses, it is an unsaid fact ever since the beginning, the sense of vision takes the highest preference and touch or feel still remains at the bottom. So, one could say that Technology has evolved along these lines all these years. It might even be possible that technology will not be centered around the things that our hands can feel and it's power to manipulate things in the future unless we change our preferences.
Hmm, I don't agree with your ranking. Each sense has a range of tasks that it covers, and although there's some overlap, each sense covers things that simply can't be replaced by the others. Therefore they are all dependent.
Sight allows highly detailed sensing of the nearby environment.
Smell gives a longer range detection, plus sensitivity to chemical differences which sight lacks.
Taste gives a more specific chemical test to things we're about to eat.
Touch provides some sensory information about the environment, but mostly it's a control for our manipulation of the world. It facilitates tool-building.
Hearing facilitates high-bandwidth information transfer (language) as well as covering some mid-range distance sensing duties for cases where our smell and sight are lacking.
I think ranking these is futile, since they all cover such manifestly different use-cases.
Hearing is high-abstraction, not high-bandwidth (that's why you can transfer voice with so little bandwidth over wires and waves). Other than that, your analysis is spot-on.
You're missing proprioception, often deemed as a sixth sense. Tools like Kinect can be used to convey commands - postural and gestural input are not really dependent on touch, and can nevertheless used for input (and output?).
If we were to have a ranking of senses, it is an unsaid fact ever since the beginning, the sense of vision takes the highest preference and touch or feel still remains at the bottom. So, one could say that Technology has evolved along these lines all these years. It might even be possible that technology will not be centered around the things that our hands can feel and it's power to manipulate things in the future unless we change our preferences.