Well they invented the steam engine and the computer in Rome and Ancient Greece respectively, but they used the former for children's toys and the latter only t

Well they invented the steam engine and the computer in Rome and Ancient Greece respectively, but they used the former for children's toys and the latter only to predict the timing of the olympic games (as far as we know). In Ancient South Asia they created an abstract and fully systematized language (Sanskrit), in Ancient Egypt they managed to stack massive blocks of sandstone into monuments with interiors that remained some of the highest buildings in the world for millennia...I'm sure there are equally impressive examples in Ancient China and Mesoamerica, but I don't know of them. Its like that old debate in Marxist political economy, between forces and relations of production: is it technology itself that produces wealth, or is it the social arrangement (including the non-human natural and technical elements) that does? Clearly, if you look at history, all the wealth of today's world only came when all the great developments of the human world were synthesized into vast industrial convolutes--so perhaps in some sense its both.