Virtually every industrial machine on this planet has made something in it build in Europe. France builds high speed rail at a third of the cost of the US. Europe has countless of pharmaceutical giants.
Again, I put it simply. The per capita income and productivity in Western Europe is roughly as high, maybe 10% lower than in the US. If Europe had 'no tech', how is Europe rich?
You have a myopic view of technology that excludes the majority of the economy, which is everything outside the world of bits as Thiel puts it, which constitutes 90% of the actual national GDP, including in the US by the way.
'AI' or 'Quantum computing' isn't some sort of economic super weapon. The German economy is 4 trillion dollars large, what is the market for quantum computing, or even 'AI'? By the way we have heard this accusation for decades. In the 70s and 80s we were accused of living in the industrial stone-age, while Britain becomes rich on being a leader in the sector of the future, finance. Where is Britain now? At a national productivity level 30% below France and Germany, turns out in the long-run finance wasn't as hip as people thought, particularly not for anyone living outside of the city of London.
I'll start to get worried about lacking in tech when software is delivering historical economic growth, rather than becoming a tool for social engineering and reshuffling money from the bottom 80% to the top 20%.
That's not to say by the way that there's not genuinely innovative aspects to software, cloud computing actually is something that Europe could catch up on if only for security and geopolitical reasons but the overwhelming majority of software giants in the US contributes nothing to innovation. Facebook and Twitter destroy democracies and heat the planet up with datacenters, nothing more. If there was a word for de-innovation, that's what I'd label those companies.