[light3]

>Are Ikea desks that can be made at 1/5th the cost but last 1/10th as long representative of the forefront of technology?

I refuted the example of technological progress being use of pneumatic tools, just look at car manufacturing, they're are an essential tool.

>Your entire arguments are based on the unstated assumption that electricity and computers are required to make anything that is on the forefront of technology.

No, my basic assumption is that education and freedom of thought are required for progress. The Amish have neither.

[lukeschlather]

I'm not saying that they're the only people using pneumatic tools out there, I'm saying that they're building new pneumatic tools every day, and some of them probably are pneumatic tools no one has ever built before. That's valuable to society at large if engineers from your car factories are visiting the Amish and swapping ideas.

Yeah, the Amish themselves aren't going to reap any benefits, and they probably aren't going to work as fast as people in a fancy lab, but they're also likely to find some one-in-a-million ideas you would never come up with in a fancy lab.