What about roman concrete, I heard they also had the steam engine, but steam technology was regarded as useless because of the abundance of slaves.
Wikipedia seems to indicate that they were responsible for a number of technological advancements.
Wikipedia seems to indicate that they were responsible for a number of technological advancements.
In contrast, technologies like the printing press have subversive uses and tie in directly to the political changes of the Renaissance.
There's even an argument (somebody's thesis) that patrolling roads was the single greatest event (invention?) that led to the end of the so-called dark ages and the beginning of the Renaissance.
Let me see if I can remember the chain: Safe roads led to trade, the return of currency as a valuable resource, the need of Lords for gold instead of cattle, oxen and straw which led to the rewriting of traditional peon contracts. Following that, inflation drove the Lords out of the counties to the cities, lifting the yoke of the local despots and freeing the country.
There was a flourishing book trade in the Roman Empire, but like most everything else books were produced through slave labour, there was enough of it to go around - imagine a big room full of scribe slaves and a reader slave at the front dictating from the master copy. Even in a podunk backwater town like Oxyrhynchus you could buy mass-produced books of quality. What was different in the time of Gutenberg is that there was a demand for books again, but scriptoria couldn't keep up with it. Mass production of books just had to happen, and this time around it had to be done without a plentiful supply of literate slaves.
There is something to be said for idea that circumstances determine what inventions will be made - it seems that right now the best minds in Western civilization are hard at work at Wall Street and Facebook, as if the most pressing problems were how to work the stock market and how to make better targeted advertising.
Smartphones, new ways of communication (such as Facebook), finding information (Google, Wikipedia), artificial intelligence (such as deep learning), ... just to name a few examples from the technology field, one of many.