A posteriori
The notion that an economically mature technology can be modeled as a free monoid is trivial because the technology is going to be completely described and communicated by standardized instructions (mechanical, logical, verbal, etc.), wherein the instructions are concatenated sentences from a specialized dictionary.
The good news is that when we have an inkling of a promising idea we can imagine how it is going to look like when fully matured. The bad news is that there's no dictionary yet to imagine it from.
The good news is that when we have an inkling of a promising idea we can imagine how it is going to look like when fully matured. The bad news is that there's no dictionary yet to imagine it from.