"Technological progress is easy to underestimate because it’s so counterintuitive to see how, for example, the philosophies of a guy who invented Polaroid film would go on to inspire the iPhone. Or how an 18th-century physicist would write a notebook that would set the foundations for a modern electrical system"

From more googling, it looks like this is called "Amara's Law": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara