At a slightly different angle: it seems like the reason we couldn’t make the thresher is that, first, we had to create “the art of building things precisely enough to make the thresher”. That is itself a technology, but it’s the sort of technology for which the very concept doesn’t really get reified before you have it, so you don’t even have general understanding that it’s what you’re missing.
From the later parts of the post, it seems like that may not be quite right, since it sounds like other places / industries had more of that technology. But I still like the general concept of “a technology that is so abstract we don’t really understand that we need it yet”, as a prerequisite to some other obviously-desirable thing. “Infrastructure” seems like not quite the thing but having a lot of overlap with it.
At a slightly different angle: it seems like the reason we couldn’t make the thresher is that, first, we had to create “the art of building things precisely enough to make the thresher”. That is itself a technology, but it’s the sort of technology for which the very concept doesn’t really get reified before you have it, so you don’t even have general understanding that it’s what you’re missing.
From the later parts of the post, it seems like that may not be quite right, since it sounds like other places / industries had more of that technology. But I still like the general concept of “a technology that is so abstract we don’t really understand that we need it yet”, as a prerequisite to some other obviously-desirable thing. “Infrastructure” seems like not quite the thing but having a lot of overlap with it.