Indeed! A thought experiment I have some times is to imagine that every machine on the earth was destroyed overnight. We still have mines, people, books. How long would it take to get back to the level of industrialisation and science that would allow us to make (in this case) a 3 million transistor chip?

The vast majority of people have little idea of how much intellectual effort has gone into the current state of technology.

Perhaps decades. Perhaps thousands of years. It probably depends upon why those machines were destroyed. Look at World War II. European nations and Japan rebuilt relatively rapidly then rapidly built upon progress made during the war. On the other hand, we have the decline of the Roman Empire. While we may now acknowledge that the dark ages weren't as dark as our 19th century peers thought, the western world lost the will or the imagination to rebuild at large scales (which the semiconductor industry certainly is).

Indeed. A lady at a bar in Portland once inquired what I thought humanity’s most advanced technological achievement was, after a slight pause I said the modern microprocessor. She laughed in my face at the suggestion. But when I pressed her for an answer of her own, she refueled to say, instead would only insist that my answer was ridiculous. Odd lady.