I think there's a lot of recency bias here. Over and over again in human history, we've lost technology. We often lose technology. The past 200 years is the exception, not the rule.

I also think that some parts are really weakly-reasoned:

> The Ancient Egyptians cut stone with an impressive level of precision. The Incas in South America did too. So much so that people sometimes claim that the Egyptians and the Incas used some kind of now-lost technology. But they most likely didn’t: they were just really good at cutting stone.

Yeah, but we're not that good at cutting stone anymore. So what gives? The explanation here is very lacking. They either had a technology that let them cut stone so well, or some special know-how (itself a form of technology, in my opinion) that enabled cutting stone so precisely.

> we're not that good at cutting stone anymore

Current methods of cutting pretty much anything including stone are absurdly more precise than what Incas and Egyptians had. We can cut stuff like diamond lenses down to 10-100nm roughness.

> Yeah, but we're not that good at cutting stone anymore

We are pretty good at cutting stone, but not very good at cutting stone with the resources available to the ancient egyptians. So in some sense the technology has been lost: but that's more because there aren't really people try to perfect that craft, as opposed to because of some magical trick or technique that we don't know anything about (Though it's murky exactly what approaches they used, that's because there's multiple plausible ones and it's hard to pin them down, not because there's no plausible ones we can think of).

You mean we are not that good at cutting stone with ancient techniques, or perhaps more accurately nobody wants to expend the manual labor when there are more efficient methods. Stone carving is still a trade you can get into but you use manual techniques for fine detail, and grinders and pneumatic tools for bulk cutting.

The Egyptian alien engineer thing is mostly a meme, but it stems from the fact that Western Egyptologists can't get their heads out of their asses long enough to agree on how it was done. Plus the Egyptian government won't allow any kind of physical or non-physical investigations because it would conflict with Zahi Hawass's personal pet theories.

No technology was really lost, we just can't agree on how they stacked the stones into pyramids. The stonecutting technology they used is very well understood and we even have real actual tools used by the actual ancient Egyptian stonecutters and some of the tools used to manipulate and place stones.

There's also several incredibly solid theories on pyramid construction, but to verify them would require investigating the actual pyramids, which Hawass will not allow.

There are mentions from ancient sources that Incas were able to "make the stone soft". I suspect that the lost technology is more likely a form of concrete, not super-precise curved stone cutting. (The Roman Pantheon dome is likely the largest concrete structure of the ancient world, and it predates Incas by several centuries.)

I agree there are much better examples. I think Historically more significant loses have happened. There is trove of techniques Gauss solved 100 years in advance that were not communicated and lost. Example here being FFTs which were not rediscovered until post ww2.

I think the question is also really hard to answer in a non-answerable way because if you don't know you've forgotten who do something you simply just don't know. If you sub-divide humanity in to factions certain factions have lost the economic ability of doing some things for example have been lost to America. While humanity can still do it certain places would be totally lost without the existing tribal knowledge. It would take us a long time to reinvigorate a tool and die industry in America its not a lost thing but if you can't do it commercial currently can you do it at all?

Hopefully that's nota weird direction to take the discussion in

I agree, the article is very dismissive about losing technology. There's lots of ways we lose technology, from big cultural changes over time (Dark Ages) as well as more niche technologies or processes, like a "secret formula" that was protected until it was lost. The difference with technology is that often we can rediscover lost technologies by the web of understanding we have around it and other advancements in our recovery techniques.

For example, Roman concrete, that strengthens in sea water: https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas...

Building edifices with accurately cut big stone blocks is out of fashion: bricks and mortar or concrete have been prevalent for many centuries. Mortar, shock-absorbing supports and other technology that can be used with stone blocks make very precise shaping pointless.

If you really think that some sort of unknown ancient supertechnology was used for creating the Egyptian's artifacts and giant structures, I'd strongly suggest you watch these two videos. They do an excellent job of completely demythifying all of those poorly substantiated speculative ideas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mysYT260dqU&list=PLuROoe7EZ3...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_NguZUDku4&t=9216s