The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves |  | Author: W. Brian Arthur
Publisher: Free Press
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 8680
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 256
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Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 1416544054
Dewey Decimal Number: 601
EAN: 9781416544050
ASIN: 1416544054
Publication Date: August 11, 2009
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Product Description
"More than any thing else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being," says W. Brian Arthur. Yet, until now the major questions of technology have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from -- how exactly does invention work? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Why are certain regions -- Cambridge, England, in the 1920s and Silicon Valley today -- hotbeds of innovation, while others languish? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? How do new industries, and the economy itself, emerge from technologies? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur sets forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology that gives answers to these questions.The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology's origins and evolution. It achieves for the progress 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. Conventional thinking ascribes the invention of technologies to "thinking outside the box," or vaguely to genius or creativity, but Arthur shows that such explanations are inadequate. Rather, technologies are put together from pieces -- themselves technologies -- that already exist. Technologies therefore share common ancestries and combine, morph, and combine again to create further technologies. Technology evolves much as a coral reef builds itself from activities of small organisms -- it creates itself from itself; all technologies are descended from earlier technologies. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, and writing in wonder fully engaging and clear prose, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
 A coherent theory of the development of technology November 12, 2009
Jay C. Smith (Portland, OR USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
 Seminal Understanding November 11, 2009
Lance L. Trebesch
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Brian Arthur's, The Nature of Technology is simply one of the best books I have ever read. How many books have we read which give us a profound understanding of the world? The Nature of Technology is a treatise on the deep underpinnings and dynamics of technology, which, as Arthur explains, is really the primary characteristic of our species on the planet. Technology is so infused into every aspect of our lives that we take for granted (or we don't know) what exactly technology is and how it evolves. In my view, decades or even centuries from now, The Nature of Technology will be recognized as a seminal piece of the puzzle of human understanding and knowledge.
CONSOLIDATING VIEWS November 2, 2009
José Porfiro da Silva (Rio Branco, Acre, Brazil)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
John Markoff does an excellent review of this book in the New York Times, on October 19, 2009, entitled "Rethinking What Leads the Way: Science, Technology or New?"
It is commendable to search for Arthur in achieving a comprehensive theory about the relationship between science and technology.
I really enjoyed the book. It is a matter of consensus difficult, but the contribution is very useful.
Better understanding the complex September 24, 2009
D. Baxter (Santa Fe NM)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
I approached this book as a layperson. With no advanced degrees or formal engineering background, I read this book and found it to be both interesting and insightful. It is clear the author has brought a complex subject and a technological expertise down to earth for the non-professional person interested in science and technology.
Even though the subject matter, the evolution of technology, is studied and debated primarily by academics and scientists, it is good to be able to delve into in a very well thought out and well written treatise.
I recommend this book to those that are interest in how so many things in our world evolve and even those that just might be interested. Makes me want to learn more.
Good step forward September 20, 2009
fg2m (IL United States)
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
Arthur has good ideas which point in the correct direction. Technology IS an evolutionary system. It DOES work using his methods of combining existing technologies and recursion. He shows that hierarchical levels of stable building blocks help a system increase in complexity.
However, I think he is not so clear that when new "domains" - such as electricity - are opened and new fundamental technological building blocks are discovered and added to existing building blocks. These then enter the realm of all existing technologies and all can combine into new technologies. How do these new domains appear?
Also, he is still incorrect about a fundamental aspect of technology. Arthur makes natural phenomena the genes of technology. But this cannot be, since gene equivalents must mutate or change in order for evolution to occur. Obviously natural laws do not change, so they cannot be the genes. He is at the level of describing biology and its evolution without knowing about what exactly are the genes. Still he is far better than most writing in this field. At least he is on the road to understanding that technology's evolution must have some sort of genetics. He is just incorrect as to what are technology's genes. Definitely worth a read.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
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