>I was actually surprised because I heard so much about crazy new materials like carbon fibers, graphene, technologies like 3D-printing,... but apparently what makes a machine break are still the same things: mechanical stress, heat dissipation, friction,... new materials and processes might change the coefficients, but not the (mostly Newtonian) physics (my interpretation btw, not his words).

I don't really see the difference between that an programming. Writing code is still a bunch of "if" statements, the same underlying data structures, same algorithms, etc. There's some new technology being added on the top akin to carbon fiber and the other things you mentioned but it's fundamentally the same.