With the tech system being similar to Vicky, I can tell that both the developers and modders are going to have a lot of fun with this aspect of the game.
For those unfamiliar with Victoria: Revolutions, one of the neat things about technologies being granted in this way is that certain technological inventions only fire if your government is set up in a certain way, or if you have other inventions discovered as well. For example, the there are a string of inventions that can fire once you discover Ideological Thought; however, they are divided up into various ideologies. So, if you want the conservative ideological events to fire, you have to discover this tech AND have a conservative political party in power. In other cases, you cannot build certain kinds of naval vessels until you have more than one discovery and invention in the naval category discovered, and since the discovery process isn't linear.... well, you get the idea.
This tech setup also allows for both beneficial and detrimental inventions based on both techs you discover and the status of your faction/country/republic/empire. In Victoria, some cultural inventions end up only having negative effects or mixing negative effects with good effects. The cultural technology Revolution and Counterrevolution, in addition to its other effects, doubles the rate at which Communists and Reactionary POPs revolt if they are unhappy (once all inventions fire). Except in a few very specialized cases, that is a bad thing. Then you have economic technologies such as Collectivist Theory that, in addition to everything else they do, fire the dreaded The Incumbent Self-Destruction of Capitalism event that results from "inventing" Karl Marx. There are also a few cultural inventions tailored just for dictatorships, monarchies, and other autocratic governments that help them spread propoganda in support of their regimes, something that democracies and constitutional monarchies don't have access too.
I suspect that Johan and his fellow Evil Geniuses (read as Developers) will make use of the evil they learned when making Victoria and will make us pay for the new technologies we get with a few counter-balancing cultural evils. I also suspect that modders are going to have all kinds of fun as well.