How Tech Loses Out
There's a part in the <i>Foundation</i> series by Asimov where the Galactic civilization has forgotten how their technology works. They have all this amazing technology, things that generate free energy and terraform planets or whatever, and all that's left are technicians who kind of know that if you push this button that thing is supposed to happen, but they have no idea what the machine is actually doing internally or the physical principles on which it operates. When the machines break, no one is able to fix them.<p>I think about this a lot and the world seems more and more like this every day.