>Technologies are idea-based, and culture is their memory.
This coda quote belongs as intro thesis, instead. The conclusion should have been: technology found in common artifacts and archived catalogs was popular, explaining historical occurrence. And it happens that popular technology takes similar shapes, because it solves the same problems in similar and effective ways.
Which is really a way of describing the thinking of man -- in other words, the abstracted container and transmitter of the technology -- as something which has remained remarkably similar over the surveyed occurrences of those popular technologies.
The immortality metaphor clouds that, unless you go all the way. To think of another set of alien species of technology requires a different way of thinking, which we can only speculate about, like about alien species which might live on a planet otherwise identical to our own.
A crucial point of the article is that it's about the technology, not the particular implementation. So in your example, it would be EVs that need to go extinct, not Tesla.
It might be both, because we could bend the definitions and what we consider tech or a gadget every which way :)
Like punchcards and related technologies are probably dead, for all intents and purposes. But you could argue that the ideas and the resulting tech (computers and programming) behind them lives on.
Some relatively recent technologies seem harder to keep alive on a small scale (crt screens, hard drives are obvious examples). Even older, simpler ones are borderline, someone (https://www.daliborfarny.com/) had to work very hard to manufacture nixie tubes again.
Many extinct animals went extinct after a few millions of years of being present, often tens of millions.
The oldest technologies humans still marginallyand recreationally use (like the flintstone knives mentioned) are maybe 30k to 50k years old. There is no 1M years old human-specific technology, because anyone resembling humans barely existed that long ago. Only the very basic things likely were used, like smashing seashells with a rock — but it's a "technology" used to this day by apes and even birds.
If you had Googled "oldest flint tools" you would have found directly that you are extremely off.
> The oldest stone tools currently pre-date genus Homo, they were found in Kenya (Lake Turkana) and date to 3.3 million years ago.
And that's just what current archeology/paleontology has been able to find so far. The find for the 3.3 million years was 700k years earlier than the previous record. It's not a stretch of the imagination to think we will find even older artifacts.
After manipulating wood and metal (soldering) I became quite fascinated by how fragile everything is. And how some people aeons ago manage to make time to craft hunting tools with stones, wood and threads is astonishing. Let alone the mastery of using them. A weak spear or arrow has big impacts on your life.
This coda quote belongs as intro thesis, instead. The conclusion should have been: technology found in common artifacts and archived catalogs was popular, explaining historical occurrence. And it happens that popular technology takes similar shapes, because it solves the same problems in similar and effective ways.
Which is really a way of describing the thinking of man -- in other words, the abstracted container and transmitter of the technology -- as something which has remained remarkably similar over the surveyed occurrences of those popular technologies.
The immortality metaphor clouds that, unless you go all the way. To think of another set of alien species of technology requires a different way of thinking, which we can only speculate about, like about alien species which might live on a planet otherwise identical to our own.