The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

There are flashes of brilliance in this work. The topic is very important and the author provides fairly clear definitions and useful examples. As the author clearly demonstrates technology is what defines are standard of living. The author’s understand that all technology is build on existing elements is very important. His explanation that neither technology nor the economy is ever in equilibrium is a point that cannot made too often. His suggested definition of economics is a profound movement in the right direction. Also his explanation that both technology and biological entities are built hierarchically and higher levels of technology cannot be created until the building blocks are in place is very important. His computer “experiment” about the development of logic circuits was very interesting. Most writing on technology and “innovation” is nonsense, with no definition, no useful conclusions, no defined course of action – it is all smoke and mirrors with anecdotal facts, worthy of PT Barnum.Here are some of couple of complaints.1) I am constantly amazed that people can talk about technology and inventions and not even mention patents. Many of the concepts the author struggles with have been dealt with by patent attorneys for years. Now in fairness the author could teach the Supreme Court a thing or two about technology, however note that none of the Supreme Court justices are patent attorneys. For instance, the author discovers that any technology can be expressed a system or a process. This is something every patent attorney learns during their first year and is clearly explained in Landis on the Mechanics of Claim Drafting.2) The author’s definition of invention and standard engineering needs to be rethought. Standard engineering is the creation of a specific instance of an invention to fit a particular need. For instance, standard engineering involves modifying a high pass operational amplifier to work for a specific design frequency or modifying it to handle a higher power signal. The engineer is not creating a new class of objects he is modifying an existing technology (invention) to meet a particular need.An invention is a human creation with an objective result, while art is a human creation with a subjective result. By objective result I mean one that is repeatable, in a scientific sense like an incandescent light bulb produces light when the appropriate electrical signal is applied. This definition is consistent with what the author calls a technology and always involves a unique combination of elements and always refers to a class of objects, such as high resistance incandescent light bulbs. An invention is always a class of things, it is a creation not a reproduction (Production).The author could learn a lot about how to define a technology or invention by studying how patent claims work (yes I am a patent attorney).3) I think the author’s definition of economy is a step in the right direction. He states economy is “the set of arrangements and activities by which a society satisfies it needs” and economics is the study of this. This is such a good step in the right direction, but “society” should be changed to “human beings.” This may sound like a small difference but it makes clear that economics applies even in small groups, even for an individual living on a deserted island. This is important because it eliminates the nonsense that what makes no sense in isolation makes sense with a large group of people.Overall a very admirable effort.Dale B. Halling, Author of Pendulum of Justice and The Decline and Fall of the American Entrepreneur.

This is a book with big problems. It discusses the evolution of technology - while mostly rejecting the idea that evolutionary theory applies to it. It says that "Darwin's mechanism does not work" when it comes to how technologies originate (p.18).He claims that Darwinism can't explain creativity and innovation - the origin of new ideas. However, a Darwinism of ideas within the brain works well at doing this. He claims that Darwinism doesn't explain a high rate of idea combination, claiming that endosymbiosis happens once in a million years, while cultural combination is ubiquitous. This argument ignores sex and less intimate symbiosis, such as parasitism and exosymbiosis. The author also raises some other, equally bogus objections to reusing evolutionary theory.Instead the author says that he will start from a "blank slate" (p.23). The book tries to develop a theory of how technology evolves from scratch. That is a huge mistake. There's no need to reinvent evolutionary theory. We have a rich theory of evolution - but the author makes little use of it. Science has long studied how culture evolves - but the author seems unfamiliar with the literature on this topic. Instead he concerns himself only with science, technology and mathematics. This is another large mistake. There's a "cultural evolution" party going on down the street, which is much bigger, noisier, and better than just studying how science, technology and mathematics change.Kevin Kelly writes on the evolution of technology without denying that Darwinism applies to it. His book on the topic is better than this one. Kevin also needs to learn more about the cultural evolution party - but, overall, that is a smaller mistake.

We are in 2009, Arthur is discussing the isomorphisms between the evolution of technologies and the evolution of living things like yourself. He starts with the provocative hypothesis that, in essence, technologies are alive and getting closer and closer to biological systems. If that is the case, kudos for Dawkins who said that evolution is the greatest show on earth, the only game in town. Thrilling. We are alive and evolving. Evolving using technology. By consequence, technology is speeding up our evolution. So, we evolve technology to evolve ourselves in a recursive loop. It is symbiosis! And Arthur did a great job knitting everything together.

I found the first few chapters of this book very basic and quite repetitive, maybe because of my solid experience in systems design. But the rest of the book is quite impressively deep and insightful. I am glad a stick to it! Also, the conclusion is still very fresh and actual, letting me wondering why hist vision is not more widely adopted.

W. Brian Arthur’s book outlines the patterns he found in technology development and its impacts on other technologies. While quite thorough, it is more of a qualitative hypothesis or position paper without a lot of data to support he 6 principles of technology evolution. This largely because the data is not easy to collect or find. He leaves it up to future research to apply facts to his premise.

Brian Arthur deserves great credit for this exploration of what technology is, where it comes from and how it evolves. It's a most interesting account and I particularly enjoyed thinking about his concluding observations that we are, in a way, slaves to the technology that we invent.I did wonder, however, whether Arthur had pulled a bit of a semantic trick, in that much of what he says about technology seems to be a restatement of what has already been said about systems in general, and in particular about purposeful systems, using the specific terminology of technology based systems. In fact I felt that the whole area of semantics was the most difficult aspect of the book. It would have been much better for having a glossary and for Arthur to have been a bit more rigorous in his use of terms. It's clear that he has a model in his head, but he does not reveal it explicitly except in prose, so we are left having to infer it. Either the model isn't a complete one that he's happy with, so he hides it from us, or it's a good semantic model and we have to waste time recreating it to clearly understand what he's saying. A couple of diagrams would have resolved the matter, leaving me to suspect the former.But these criticisms should not detract from my enormous gratitude and admiration for the thinking that has gone into this endeavour to explain what we see around us. It is an entertainingly and, with caveats, beautifully written account. I am glad he gave me the opportunity to follow his journey.

A distinctive and original theoretical analysis of the lifecycle of a) technologies (e.g. physical devices) and b) technological domains (e.g. electronics). The author makes a good job of analysing how technologies emerge and evolve, with an impressive array of ideas and quotable insights. However, the book becomes too ambitious in attempting to create an over-arching theory of the relationship between technology and economics, which surely deserves a separate treatment. More generally this book needed stronger editing, not least because it's both repetitive and verbose. I would nevertheless recommend it to anyone with an interest in the theory and philosophy of technology.

Arthur's argument, that technology begets further technology, and that we are living in a moment where such is the power and scope of technologies that we should be prepared for exponential development is a bit too rosy for my taste. Whilst not blind to the faults of technology, and often very perceptive about its limitations, he places too much faith in how the engineering process meets the science with the result of human happiness. Inadvertently, this throws up some of the problems of technology without intending to do so: arbitrary implementation of technology unsuited to the kind of problem solving he thinks engineers are so good at, the means by which bad technology distorts the direction of scientific effort to create worse technology, or the impact of unplanned technological solutions on the lives of humans. All this is framed in a definition of technology that seems unacceptably broad, and fails to distinguish between conceptual worlds and practical function. His three main principles of technological recursion, combination and exploitation foreshadow the closer relationship between business and technology than any kind of underlying science. This turns into an argument that implies some technological triumphalism: technology apparently makes us what we are (in the conceptual sense that, by Arthur's definition, every complex set of ideas is a technology), and yet we see technologies of the practical kind deployed in many ways that reflect a creativity not possessed by the engineers that generated them.At his best, Arthur is well informed about engineering process, and one can only marvel at the breadth of his frame of reference. This is a serious book for anyone interested in technology and how it develops, even if I don't agree with its sanguine conclusions.

Although is is well thought through and considered, I feel it would be possible to 'get to the point' in a simpler and more succinct way.

I'm still part way through. Which tells its own story. I am intending to return to it when I need a break from Henry VIII and the Tudor Court.