By W. Brian Arthur
“More than the rest expertise creates our global. It creates our wealth, our financial system, our very method of being,” says W. Brian Arthur. but regardless of technology’s irrefutable significance in our day-by-day lives, earlier its significant questions have long past unanswered. the place do new applied sciences come from? What constitutes innovation, and the way is it accomplished? Does expertise, like organic lifestyles, evolve? during this groundbreaking paintings, pioneering expertise philosopher and economist W. Brian Arthur solutions those questions and extra, atmosphere forth a boldly unique mind set approximately expertise.
The Nature of know-how is a sublime and strong concept of technology’s origins and evolution. attaining for the improvement of know-how what Thomas Kuhn’s The constitution of medical Revolutions did for clinical growth, Arthur explains how transformative new applied sciences come up and the way innovation particularly works. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from old innovations to the high-tech wonders of at the present time, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening trip that might switch the way in which we predict approximately expertise and the way it constructions our lives. The Nature of know-how is a vintage for our instances.
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Additional resources for The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves
Sample text
Technology, once a means of production, is becoming a chemistry. In attempting to come up with a theory of technology, our first challenge will be to see if we can say something general about it. It is not clear a priori that we can. Hydroelectric power, the process of plastic injection molding, and beekeeping, to choose three technologies at random, seem to have nothing in common. But we will see in the next chapter that technologies do share a common logic in the way they are put together. And this will tell us much about how combination has to work, how technologies come into being, how they subsequently develop, and how they evolve.
The first will be the one I have been talking about: that technologies, all technologies, are combinations. This simply means that individual technologies are constructed or put together—combined—from components or assemblies or subsystems at hand. The second will be that each component of technology is itself in miniature a technology. This sounds odd and I will have to justify it, but for now think of it as meaning that because components carry out specific purposes just as overall technologies do, they too qualify as technologies.
How Technologies Are Structured I want now to come back to the question I posed at the end of the last chapter. Do technologies—individual ones—share any common logic? In particular, do they share any common structure in the way they are organized? The answer, as I said, does not look promising. Nevertheless, we shall see shortly that technologies do share a common anatomical structure. Technologies in this regard are like some category of animals—vertebrates, say. Vertebrates differ widely in their anatomical plans and outside appearance; a hippopotamus looks nothing like a snake.
