I’ve long considered “hard tech” (semiconductors, high end manufacturing, aerospace, etc) to be the embodiment of our culture, because it’s not something you can just start doing, it takes generations of improvement to make anything worthwhile.
That is how I generally see it. The technological suite needed to get to that stage is astounding.
It is a great indicator of progress and decline, like how the quality of crockery dropped in the roman empire showed how their economics hampered their skills.
Maybe computing is one of the big hurdles that shows the overall capabilities of economies and on a much more broad scale, species. Like wrap drives in Star Trek.
