This is a very good and thought provoking question, and in reality it covers much of what we see today, both in hardware(the things that are big or spinning or controlling that item that moves) to the software( which is still in its infancy, but yet can control anything from the tiny hearing aids to the biggest machines man can make).
Take for example my generation Born in the fortie's, Steam trains were still the main tractive power items for moving the masses, a cleaver Sqdn Ldr called Whittle designed the jet engine which once given to America with their production ability's went on to conquer the World of avaition, hand held calculators didn't arrive untill the start of the seventies up to then the majority of us used slide rules and whizz wheels, machinery was (UK that is) was always held together with Whitworth threads.
So the evolution of technology eventually gets thru to us all, but the teaching of my generation must be superceeded, for like the Whitworth Thread it is old and based on so very few academics who made and gave us answers,... but who was there to counter such answers?
Peter R-B