A technology is a cultural evolution — product/hardware or process/software — designed to solve a problem

Technologies follow three fundamental principles

  • Combinatorial evolution
    • Early technologies form using existing primitive technologies as components. These new technologies in time become possible components (building blocks) for the construction of further new technologies
    • In this way, slowly over time, many technologies form from an initial few, and more complex ones form using simpler ones as components. The overall collection of technologies bootstraps itself upward from the few to the many and from the simple to the complex
    • Self-creation: each new technology not only unlocks future combinations, but comes with its own set of problems, which are opportunities for future technologies. Needs derive more from technology itself than directly from human wants
  • Recursive structure
    • Each component of a technology — a subsystem for a product or a stage for a process — is itself in miniature a technology
  • Programming of phenomena
    • All technologies harness and exploit some effect or phenomenon, usually several. Conventional technologies, such as radar and electricity generation, are based on physical phenomena. Other purposed systems, such as contracts and money, do not feel like technologies because they are based upon nonphysical (e.g., behavioral) effects. Recursiveness and combinatorial evolution also apply there
    • Seen this way, technology is a programming of nature — a complex of captured phenomena supporting each other, continuously and interactively “calling” each other much as subroutines in computer programs

Technology and Science

  • Science and technology co-evolve in a symbiotic relationship
  • Science is necessary for the unearthing of modern phenomena, the more deeply hidden clusters of effects (electrical, chemical, quantum, etc.). It provides the means for observing effects; the understandings needed for working with them; the theories predicting how they will behave; and often the methods to capture them for use
  • It seems that science discovers and technology applies. Is technology then applied science? No, this is a gross oversimplification
  • Technologists use scientific ideas much as politicians use the ideas of defunct political philosophers. They exploit them day-to-day without much awareness of the details of their origin
  • Technology builds both from science and from its own experience. As this happens, Science organically becomes deeply woven into Technology
  • But equally deeply, technology is woven into science. Technology (instruments and methods) is necessary to probe nature for explanations. Without the telescope, X-ray diffraction, the electron microscope, the computer, modern science wouldn’t exist

Technology and Economics

  • Technology forms the economy’s skeletal structure and gives it its evolving nature
  • As the collective of technology — and purposed systems (businesses, institutions, etc.) beyond technologies exploiting natural phenomena — builds, it creates a structure within which decisions and activities and flows of goods and services take place. We call this the economy
  • Because the economy arises out of its technologies, it inherits their perpetual self-creation: its arrangements create further possibilities and problems that call forth further responses
  • Economics as a discipline is often criticized because, unlike the “hard sciences” of physics or chemistry, it cannot be pinned down to an unchanging set of descriptions over time. But this is natural as the economy is a constantly evolving complex system

Technology and Knowledge

  • Knowledge and ideas also evolve largely through combination as the mechanism of variation
  • We can draw a closer parallel to combinatorial evolution than to standard Darwinian evolution (outlined by Deutsch)
  • What makes a technology an invention, as opposed to innovation born from standard day-to-day engineering problem solving? Using a principle new or different to the purpose in hand. Invention then consists in linking a need with some new effect to achieve it