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The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, by W. Brian Arthur
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“More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being,” says W. Brian Arthur. Yet despite technology’s irrefutable importance in our daily lives, until now its major questions have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions and more, setting forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology.
The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology’s origins and evolution. Achieving for the development of technology what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress, Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives. The Nature of Technology is a classic for our times.
- Sales Rank: #132097 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Free Press
- Published on: 2011-01-11
- Released on: 2011-01-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x .80" w x 5.50" l, .51 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
What is technology in its nature, in its deepest essence? Where does it come from? How does it evolve? With contagious enthusiasm, Arthur, an economics professor and a pioneer of complexity theory, tries to answer these and other questions in a style that is by turns sparkling and flat. Technology is self-creating, though it requires human agency to build it up and reproduce it. Yet technology evolves much like organisms evolve, and Arthur cannily applies Darwin's ideas to technologies and their growth. All technologies descend from earlier ones, and those that perform better and more efficiently than others are selected for future growth and development. But radical novelty in technology cannot be explained by this model of variation and selection, so Arthur argues that novel technologies arise by combination of existing technologies. For example, a hydroelectric power generator combines several main components—a reservoir to store water, an intake system, turbines driven by high-energy water flow, transformers to convert the power output to a higher voltage: groups of self-contained technologies—into a new technology. Arthur's arguments will likely alter the reader's way of thinking about technology and its relationship to humanity. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“…enlightening and stimulating, enhanced by a remarkable diversity of historical examples…The book invites comparison to work by Thomas Kuhn…Economists, social scientists, engineers and scientists all may come to regard it as a landmark.” —Science
“Provocative and engaging...Arthur’s theory captures many well-known features of technological change [and] also answers interesting questions.”—Nature
“…reframes the relationship between science and technology as part of an effort to come up with a comprehensive theory of innovation… Dr. Arthur is bold in his reassessment of the role of technology in science.” —The New York Times
Review
"Brian Arthur's brilliantly original analysis of how technology develops and evolves reminds me of Euclid's Geometry -- it's clear, simple and seemingly self-evident now that a master has spent years working it out. The Nature of Technology is a seminal work, thrilling to read and rich in implications for business as well as engineering and the social sciences." -- Richard Rhodes, Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction for The Making of the Atomic Bomb
"The Nature of Technology is the most important book on technology and the economy since Schumpeter. In clear, lucid prose and with fascinating examples, Arthur describes how technology 'creates itself' in an evolutionary process that has taken our world from stone tools to iPods. A work of deep and lasting importance that deserves to be widely read -- you will not think about technology the same way again." -- Eric D. Beinhocker, author of The Origin of Wealth
"The refreshing clarity that Brian Arthur brings to the most overwhelming force in the universe will benefit anyone trying to tame technology -- critics, eager boosters, and the perplexed alike." -- Kevin Kelly, author of New Rules for the New Economy
"Hundreds of millions of dollars slosh around Silicon Valley every day based on Brian Arthur's ideas." -- John Seeley Brown, former director of PARC
"We launched Java based on Brian Arthur's ideas." -- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
Most helpful customer reviews
46 of 51 people found the following review helpful.
Clear thinking on how technology evolves and shapes the economy
By Steven Forth
An engaging and thought provoking book, Arthur provides a powerful framework for understanding how technologies evolve and are a key driver of productivity growth. According to Arthur (and he does a good job of demonstrating his case), technologies are based on interactions with natural phenomena that are composed into modular systems of components that grow into domains with their own conceptual languages. Because the systems are modular, they can leverage the combinatorial explosion and once a certain technology reaches a critical mass of components and interfaces it can evolve rapidly, entering new domains and exposing new natural phenomena to interact with. Arthur provides many examples that are interesting in their own right - from the evolution of airplanes and turbojets to genetics and even gearing systems or sorting algorithms.
One test of a book is if it draws you towards additional reading that you might not have otherwise discovered. Arthur's book caused me to run out (to Amazon) and order Colum Gilfillan's 1935 book Inventing the Ship and decide to finally read Donald McKenzie's book Knowing Machines. Thank you.
I do have a few quibbles. I think Arthur makes a serious conceptual error in making natural phenomena the `genes' of his system. I understand the temptation, but I think the metaphor is based on a misunderstanding of how genes actually function in living systems (see for example Lenny Moss' book What Genes Can't Do). The primitive elements in technology evolution can not be natural phenomena themselves but how humans (and other species) interact with these phenomena. I am not sure how to formalize this, probably something like a `theory in use" of cause and effect for natural phenomena, not something as formal as a scientific theory, more the rules of thumb and satisficing that we use as we interact with our world.
There are also some conceptual frameworks that could be used to complement Arthur's approach. I think the most important of these is that of design spaces, and the idea that technological progress is based on the expansion of and improved search over design spaces. For me, Stuart Kaufmann's work is foundational here. Other work that complements Arthur's is Baldwin and Clark's wonderful book Design Rules (I hope that Volume 2 actually comes out one day) and the many applications of design patterns that are spreading from Christopher Alexander to the software industry to many other areas of endeavor. I personally find work in mereology useful in thinking about part-whole relationships and in converting combinatorial explosions into navigable design spaces, see for example Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi on Parts and Places.
Arthur's approach is going to need some formalization and a lot more application, but I think it proposes a useful way forward. It will be interesting to see how these ideas are applied to technologies such as markets and financial instruments, as well as new designs for organizations such as the fourth sector.
30 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
A coherent theory of the development of technology
By Jay C. Smith
W. Brian Arthur, who is both an engineer and an economist, has thought a lot about the logic of technology. The strength of this book resides in how he pulls his observations together into a clear and coherent theory of how technology evolves. Arthur repeats himself to some degree throughout (one could read just the preface and the last chapter to grasp the main elements of his theory), but the prose is relatively jargon-free and straight-forward.
All technologies, as Arthur defines them, (1) entail a means to fulfill a human purpose and (2) involve an assemblage of practices and components (both devices and methods). "Technology" can also mean the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture.
The essence of technology, Arthur suggests, is a phenomenon or set of phenomena captured and put to use, a programming of one or more of "truisms of nature" to our purposes (for example, burning certain fuels produces energy we can employ in many ways). The history of technology, he proposes, is one of capturing finer and finer phenomena, enabled by earlier technology.
As he sees it, technology provides a "vocabulary" of elements that can be put together in endlessly new ways for novel purposes. Technology is "autopoietic," or self-creating, Arthur believes. It creates new opportunity niches and new problems, which call forth still more new technology. The economy is in a state of perpetual novelty, unsatisfied, roiling constantly.
According to Arthur, technologies often group together into "domains" based on the natural effects they exploit. He believes that, "A change in domain is the main way in which technology progresses" (for example, a shift from mechanical to electronic controls, or from analogue to digital electronics).
Just because we have a theory for how technology evolves does not mean, however, that we can accurately predict the technological future. There are many indeterminacies, Arthur says. He recognizes that the investment and publicity environments, for example, matter in determining what gets developed and adopted, and at what speed, but he doesn't say much about these matters.
Yet if technology has a logic of its own, why does it proceed at a different pace and on a different course in different places? The obvious answer is, I believe, that culture matters too, in all its manifestations (business systems, religious beliefs, governance structures, and so on). To be fair, Arthur says he made a deliberate choice to focus on the logic of technical creation (and not on the people or institutions who do it), and he treats societal institutions themselves as technologies, but as a consequence he sometimes comes across as too techno-centric.
While Arthur does an admirable job of presenting historical examples (drawn mostly from the past two centuries), he has been selective, naturally latching on to cases that support his contentions. Do not expect a broad history of technology in the sense of a systematic survey of a wide range of developments in any given historical era. Thus we don't know for sure from this volume alone how well his theory might hold up against a more inclusive consideration of historical developments, especially across cultures.
Because Arthur's concept of technology is so broad (pretty much anything that fulfills a human purpose counts), it raises several boundary issues; for example, where should one draw the line between science and technology? He concedes that it would be stretching things to call Newton's explanations, for instance, "technologies" and proposes that it is better to think of scientific explanations as purposed systems that are "cousins" to technology.
In the end, though, such fuzziness may not be much of a detriment, because Arthur's broad conceptions lead him to provocative insights. For example, he rejects the idea that technology is simply the application of science and he observes that many technologies came into being without drawing on science directly at all (for example, powered flight). It was only when the phenomena driving technology began to fall below the threshold of unaided human observation (such as electrical and chemical phenomena) that science began to play more of a role, he proposes.
Arthur also has engaging things to say about similarities and differences between technology and biology, about how engineers work, about how economic "needs" are generated, about our conceptions of nature versus technology, and about several other related subjects that should be of interest to many general readers.
32 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
Mildly interesting...
By DJR
The author proposes what he calls "combinatorial evolution" which follows from Joseph Schumpeter's work in the field of economics. In a nutshell, the theory is that primitive technologies are used as building blocks for newer technology. Over time, the new technologies become modular components of succeeding technologies and over time technology becomes increasingly complex. "Technology creates itself out of itself." Sudden change or innovation arises because new environments arise and technology has the ability to capture the latest discoveries of natural phenomena. An interesting point is made about how complex technologies are created using subsystems. The author contends that modularity is essential for all complex systems because cognitive psychologists have found that, by necessity, humans understand complex situations by breaking a problem into chunks and repeating the process until the fundamental components are obvious.
The value of any theory is in the insight that it generates. In the concluding section of the book, the author makes a series of predictions in light of previous discussions. None of them are particularly impressive. For example, one prediction is that the economy is moving from one that values the ownership of resources to one that values the ownership of scientific and technical expertise. That would have been an insightful observation had it been made before the era of Microsoft and Google. Now it is simply a tenet of the Information Age.
Throughout the book, it is clear that the author enjoys discussing technology and at times digresses into discussions of particular technologies to elaborate his point. For the layperson, these examples will likely be informative. For someone familiar with engineering and science, the material may be superfluous. Admittedly, for this very reason, I skimmed much of the central sections of the book where the original arguments are fleshed out with examples.
In general, this book is intended for a popular audience. A specialist may be somewhat disappointed by the lack of groundbreaking material considering the publisher unwisely claims that "it achieves for the progress of technology what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress." It doesn't. But, overzealous marketing aside, it is a reasonable addition to the field of technology studies.
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