A historian or a sociologist will say something like “technology doesn’t exist on a simply hierarchy like in a video game,” and I think people whose exposure to history is primarily through pop culture will go “huh? that seems like nonsense. I mean, an automatic rifle beats a sword. 21st century America is richer than 3000 BC Mesopotamia. Our medical technology right now, today, is better than anything in the Middle Ages. Of course you can ‘rank’ technology!”
But the real answer is still no; because no technology exists apart from its context, and the question you are forgetting is–better how? Better in what situations?
The Ancient Greeks knew the principles necessary to build steam engines, and probably would perfectly understand the principle of operation of a steam locomotive; but they didn’t build trains, because they didn’t have the metals to build trains with, and they didn’t have the metals to build trains with because the economy of the ancient eastern Mediterranean didn’t support the manufacture of steel; and it didn’t support the manufacture of steel because bronze and the iron they had solved all the problems they needed metals for, a king of ancient Greece devoting his city-state’s spare productive capacity to mining iron ore and turning it into steel would have been wiped out by neighboring states who didn’t waste time and energy doing that, and spent their time making a bunch of bronze swords and beating the crap out of that king and his soldiers. Even if the Greeks could have built trains, what would they use them for? Railroads are a solution to transportation when you have industrial quantities of goods moving around to support a highly integrated economy, a rich source of high-carbon fuel easily available, and (for instance) warfare based on massive formations recruited from a mobilized, industrialized population.
None of which ancient Greece had. If you Connecticut-Yankee’d your way into 5th century BC Greece, you would find that trying to bootstrap an industrial economy from the ground up would require first speedrunning 2300 years of intervening demographic and economic developments, as well as technological ones, and even then a modern Greece surrounded by a Bronze Age world would be a very different animal, along all those dimensions, than a modern Greece surrounded by a modern world.
If you wanted to go Alexander with modern combined arms tactics and maneuver warfare, you could–but modern combined arms tactics and maneuver warfare is a solution to modern arms, and you might find it was significantly cheaper to arm your hoplites with slightly upgraded versions of the old spear-and-shield, and invest all the materials and energy you would have spent on tanks in building up the wealth of your state–because remember, everything you spend on building a better tank you’re not spending on anything else. This is why German technical skill was a miserable failure in WW2–their overengineered bullshit was expensive, and for each fancy German tank they pumped out (from a much worse position resource-wise than the Allies), the Allies made many less fancy, good enough tanks, and the Nazis got overrun. To recall the earlier metaphor: your automatic rifle is only any good if the other guy is way over there. If he sneaks up on you with his sword, you might wish you had a sword instead, though that won’t help you if you’ve only ever practiced using a rifle, because it’s “better.”
Even the process of innovation is not like most people imagine it, I would argue. The bulk of innovation comes from incremential trial-and-error improvements in processes that accumulate over decades, if not centuries or millennia. Incremential improvement is hard; unless you have a wild overabundance of resources, too much experimentation is just going to waste scarce materials; the thing that drives major innovations is having a problem that needs solving, and (again, until a resource becomes superabundant) a reliable method that produces consistent results is better than wasting time and effort testing a new way of producing something that may or may not work.
If you want an antibiotic or to send a message across the world, or figure out what the Moon is made of, yes, modern technology is better for all those things; and there are periods of cultural and societal change that open up the space for innovations: the steam locomotive was impossible in 5th century BC Greece, and inevitable in 19th century Britain. But it only became inevitable because of economic changes that only became inevitable because of demographic changes that started much earlier; those in turn were dependent on factors beyond the control of any single person or state.
Technologies can be dependent on each other, or on other factors, in the way living organisms are dependent on each other or on environmental factors in a food web; but a shark isn’t “better” than a jellyfish because it has a more complicated anatomy. It’s solving the problem of how to be a shark, while the jellyfish is solving the problem of how to be a jellyfish. Even our industrial, “scientific” technologies can struggle in environments they’re not suited for, which more “primitive” technologies do perfectly well in–because even our best technology (and our best scientists) are constrained by the environments and assumptions they are developed in.
I’ve started to look at it as a sort of evolutionary process, where instead of saying that this or that technology is “better”, you need to look at as “this or that technology is better for this or that particular thing in this or that particular socioeconomic context.” Instead of having one generic variable of “goodness”, you have a multi-dimensional space of different variables for which a particular technology may be good or bad; and even “primitive” technologies can still be optimal in some specific niche.
