Systematic application  

I found this article about indigenous Americans and technology quite provocative, although I might have been more satisfied if he'd taken a sharper/more specific stand on just what technology means. Certainly my instinctive reaction would have been that technology goes hand in hand with progress (you can't have technology without technological advancement?), and I wonder how the idea of progress would fit into his definition. I suppose part of the point of the article is that looking backwards is what creates that sensation of determined, directional progress. Is it like arguing that conditions on earth are extraordinary because they are exactly the one-in-a-zillion conditions necessary to bring forth life that looks like us, even by definition though our presence here makes any deviation from those conditions on earth impossible?