[breather]

I'm as keen to wax poetic about the non-economic potential of technology as the next person, but I'm not deluding myself into thinking that was why the technology was developed in the first place.

Also, a military advantage is an economic one, there's no real difference between the concepts.

[wrs]

So you’re saying all of technology is the result of saying “we could make money if we had a thing that did X”, and none of it is the result of “we found a way to do X because we thought it would be cool.”

If nothing else, you just dismissed most of mathematics and basic physics.