Hi, I'm the author. Thanks for your thoughts. Think about it less literally. Remember the part where the machine choses from one of 725 variations on a part? Think about all that goes behind that. It's the accumulation of decades of hard work that has led to technological advances in manufacturing processes and hardware designs to lead to this moment. No other civilization in history could have dreamt of manufacturing something so refined on this scale, so (relatively) cheaply. And think about the historical macro-scale of the iPhone and Mobile in general. The Massai warrior in Kenya has more information in his phone than Nixon did in the White house. That is a civilization-scale accomplishment.