The Nature of Technology Quotes

“In its collective sense, technology is not merely a catalog of individual parts. It is a metabolic chemistry, an almost limitless collective of entities that interact to produce new entities-and further needs. And we should not forget that needs drive the evolution of technology every bit as much as the possibilities for fresh combination and the unearthing of phenomena. Without the presence of unmet needs, nothing novel would appear in technology.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“At the creative heart of invention lies appropriation, some sort of mental borrowing that comes in the form of a half-conscious suggestion.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“I will give technology three definitions that we will use throughout the book.

The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose. For some technologies-oil refining-the purpose is explicit. For others- the computer-the purpose may be hazy, multiple, and changing. As a means, a technology may be a method or process or device: a particular speech recognition algorithm, or a filtration process in chemical engineering, or a diesel engine. it may be simple: a roller bearing. Or it may be complicated: a wavelength division multiplexer. It may be material: an electrical generator. Or it may be nonmaterial: a digital compression algorithm. Whichever it is, it is always a means to carry out a human purpose.

The second definition I will allow is a plural one: technology as an assemblage of practices and components. This covers technologies such as electronics or biotechnology that are collections or toolboxes of individual technologies and practices. Strictly speaking, we should call these bodies of technology. But this plural usage is widespread, so I will allow it here.

I will also allow a third meaning. This is technology as the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture. Here we are back to the Oxford's collection of mechanical arts, or as Webster's puts it, "The totality of the means employed by a people to provide itself with the objects of material culture." We use this collective meaning when we blame "technology" for speeding up our lives, or talk of "technology" as a hope for mankind. Sometimes this meaning shades off into technology as a collective activity, as in "technology is what Silicon Valley is all about." I will allow this too as a variant of technology's collective meaning. The technology thinker Kevin Kelly calls this totality the "technium," and I like this word. But in this book I prefer to simply use "technology" for this because that reflects common use.

The reason we need three meanings is that each points to technology in a different sense, a different category, from the others. Each category comes into being differently and evolves differently. A technology-singular-the steam engine-originates as a new concept and develops by modifying its internal parts. A technology-plural-electronics-comes into being by building around certain phenomena and components and develops by changing its parts and practices. And technology-general, the whole collection of all technologies that have ever existed past and present, originates from the use of natural phenomena and builds up organically with new elements forming by combination from old ones.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Origination in scientific theorizing, as in technology, is at bottom a linking-a linking of the observational givens of a problem with a principle (a conceptual insight) that roughly suggests these, and eventually a complete set of principles that reproduce these.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“We now have a more direct description of technology than saying it is a means to a purpose. A technology is a phenomenon captured and put to use.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Phenomena are simply natural effects, and as such they exist independently of humans and of technology. They have no “use” attached to them. A principle by contrast is the idea of use of a phenomenon for some purpose and it exists very much in the world of humans and of use.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose. For some technologies—oil refining—the purpose is explicit.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Technology, once a means of production, is becoming a chemistry.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Our deepest hope as humans lies in technology; but our deepest trust lies in nature.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Real advanced technology—on-the-edge sophisticated technology—issues not from knowledge but from something I will call deep craft. Deep craft is more than knowledge. It is a set of knowings. Knowing what is likely to work and what not to work. Knowing what methods to use, what principles are likely to succeed, what parameter values to use in a given technique. Knowing whom to talk to down the corridor to get things working, how to fix things that go wrong, what to ignore, what theories to look to. This sort of craft-knowing takes science for granted and mere knowledge for granted. And it derives collectively from a shared culture of beliefs, an unspoken culture of common experience.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“adaptive stretch. When a new circumstance comes along or a demand for a different sphere of application arrives, it is easier to reach for the old technology—the old base principle—and adapt it by “stretching” it to cover the new circumstances.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“In the movie Star Wars, the malign aspect of technology is the Death Star. It is an object huge and disconnected from humanness that reduces its clients to clones-recognizably human, but all identically in thrall to the machine, all drained of color and drained of will. Its protagonist, Darth Vader, is not a full human being either. He is constructed-part technology, part human body. The heroes, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, by contrast are fully human. They have individuality, they have will, and they hang with creatures in a haunt called the Mos Eisley Cantina-creatures that are strange, distorted, and perverse, but that brim with messy vitality. If you look at the heroes, they have technology as well. But their technology is different. It is not hidden and dehumanizing; their starships are rickety and organic and have to be kicked to get running. This is crucial. Their technology is human. It is an extension of their natures, fallible, human, individual, and therefore beneficent. They have not traded their humanness for technology, nor surrendered their will to technology. Technology has surrendered to them. And in doing so it extends their naturalness.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Whether in fiction or movies, if we examine the stories we tell ourselves, we see the question is not whether we should possess technology or not. It is whether we should accept technology as faceless and will-deadening versus possess technology as organic and life -enhancing.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Conceptually at least, biology is becoming technology. And physically, technology is becoming biology. The two are starting to close on each other, and indeed as we move deeper into genomics and nanotechnology, more than this, they are starting to intermingle.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“No engineering technology is remotely as complicated in its workings as the cell.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“There are two answers. One is that all technologies are in a sense simultaneously mechanistic and organic. if you examine a technology from the top down, you see it as an arrangement of connected parts interacting and intermeshing with each other to some purpose. In this sense it becomes a clockwork device-it becomes mechanistic. If you examine it mentally from the bottom up, however, from how these parts are put together, you see these as integral parts-integral organs-forming a higher, functioning, purposed whole. it becomes a functioning body-it becomes organic. Whether a technology is mechanistic or organic therefore depends on your point of view. The other answer is purely biological: technologies are acquiring properties we associate with living organisms. As they sense and react to their environment, as they become self-assembling, self-configuring, self-healing, and "cognitive," they more and more resemble living organisms. The more sophisticated and "high-tech" technologies become, the more they become biological. We are beginning to appreciate that technology is as much metabolism as mechanism.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“In this way the original arrival of textile machinery not only replaced cottage hand manufacturing, it set up an opportunity for a higher-level set of arrangements-the factory system-in which the machinery became merely a component. The new factory system in turn set up a chain of needs-for labor and housing-whose solutions created further needs, and all this in time became the Victorian industrial system. The process took a hundred years or more to reach anything like completion.

The reader might object that this makes structural change appear too simplistic-too mechanical. Technology A sets up a need for arrangements B; technology C fulfills this, but sets up further needs D and E; these are resolved by technologies F and G. Certainly such sequences do form the basis of structural change, but there is nothing simple about them. The factory system itself needed means of powering the new machinery, systems of ropes and pulleys for transmitting this power, means of acquiring and keeping track of materials, means of bookkeeping, means of management, means of delivery of the product. And these in turn were built from other components, and had their own needs. Structural change is fractal, it branches out at lower levels, just as an embryonic arterial system branches out as it develops into smaller arteries and capillaries.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“When we examined the detailed history of the evolution, we found large gaps of time in which little happened at all. Then we saw the sudden appearance of a key circuit (an enabling technology) and quick use of this for further technologies. A full adder circuit might appear after say 32,000 steps; and 2-,3-,and 4-bit adders fairly quickly after that. In other words, we found periods of quiescence, followed by miniature "Cambrian explosions" of rapid evolution.

We also found, not surprisingly, that the evolution was history dependent. In different runs of the experiment the same simple technologies would emerge, but in a different sequence. Because more complicated technologies are constructed from simpler ones, they would often be put together from different building blocks. (If bronze appears before iron in the real world, many artifacts are made of bronze; if iron appears before bronze, the same artifacts would be made of iron.) We also found that some complex needs for circuits such as adders or comparators with many inputs-different ones each time-would not be fulfilled at all.

And we found avalanches of destruction. Superior technologies replaced previously functioning ones. And this meant that circuits used only for these now obsolete technologies were themselves no longer needed, and so these in turn were replaced. This yielded avalanches we could study and measure.

In these ways we were able to examine the evolution of technology in action, and it bore out the story I gave earlier in this chapter.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“There is always a temptation for governments to pursue science with particular commercial aims in view. But this rarely works. Had there been a stated purpose to quantum physics in the 1920s, it would have been deemed a failure. And yet quantum physics has given us the transistor, the laser, the basis of nanotechnology, and much else besides. Building a capacity for advanced technology is not like planning production in a socialist economy, but more like growing a rock garden. Planting, watering, and weeding are more appropriate than five-year plans.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“A novel technology is "pushed," runs into limitations, and improves through superior parts and structural deepenings. But this same process applies to all of its parts as well. Development is very much an internal process. The whole of a technology and all of its parts develop simultaneously in parallel.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“What I have said makes it appear that this process of improvement by internal replacement applies to the technology as a whole. But by our recursion principle, it applies to all constituent parts of the technology as well: a technology improves as better subparts and sub-subparts are swapped into its assemblies and subassemblies. This means we need to think of a technology as an object-more an organism, really-that develops through its constituent parts and subparts improving simultaneously at all levels in its hierarchy.

And there is something else. A technology developls not just by the direct efforts applied to it. Many of a technology's parts are shared by other technologies, so a great deal of development happens automatically as components improve in other uses "outside" that technology. For decades, aircraft instruments and control mechanism benefited from outside progress in electronic components. A technology piggybacks on the external development of its components.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“We now have our answer to the key question of how novel technologies arise. The mechanism is certainly not Darwinian; novel species in technology do not arise from the accumulation of small changes. They arise from a process, a human and often lengthy one, of linking a need with a principle (some generic use of an effect) that will satisfy it. This linkage stretches from the need itself to the base phenomenon that will be harnessed to meet it, through supporting solutions and subsolutions. And making it defines a recursive process. The process repeats until each subproblem resolves itself into one that can be physically dealt with. In the end the problem must be solved with pieces-components-that already exist (or pieces that can be created from ones that already exist). To invent something is to find it in what previously exists.

We can now understand why invention varies so much. A particular case can be need-driven or phenomenon-driven; it can have a lone originator or many; its principle may be difficult to conceive of, or may have emerged naturally; translating that principle into physical components may be straightforward or may proceed in steps as crucial subproblems are resolved. But whatever their particular histories, at bottom all inventions share the same mechanism: all link a purpose with a principle that will fulfill it, and all must translate that principle into working parts.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“What about origination in mathematics? This is also a linking, but this time of what needs to be demonstrated-usually a theorem-to certain conceptual forms or principles that will together construct the demonstration. Think of a theorem as a carefully constructed logical argument. It is valid if it can be constructed under accepted logical rules from other valid components of mathematics-other theorems, definitions, and lemmas that form the available parts and assemblies in mathematics.

Typically the mathematcian "sees" or struggles to see one or two overarching principles: conceptual ideas that if provable provide the overall route to a solution. To be proved, these must be constructed from other accepted subprinciples or theorems. Each part moves the argument part of the way. Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's theorem uses as its base principle a conjecture by the Japanese mathematicians Taniyama and Shimura that connects two main structures he needs, modular forms and elliptic equations.

To prove this conjecture and link the components of the argument, Wiles uses many subprinciples. "You turn to a page and there's a brief appearance of some fundamental theorem by Deligne," says mathematician Kenneth Ribet, "and then you turn to another page and in some incidental way there's a theorem by Hellegouarch-all of these things are just called into play and used for a moment before going on to the next idea." The whole is a concatenation of principles-conceptual ideas-architected together to achieve the purpose. And each component principle, or theorem, derives from some earlier concatenation. Each, as with technology, provides some generic functionality-some key piece of the argument-used in the overall structure.

That origination in science or in mathematics is not fundamentally different from that in technology should not be surprising. The correspondences exist not because science and mathematics are the same as technology. They exist because all three are purposed systems-means to purposes, broadly interpreted-and therefore must follow the same logic. All three are constructed from forms or principles: in the case of technology, conceptual methods; in the case of science, explanatory structures; in the case of mathematics, truth structures consistent with basic axioms. Technology, scientific explanation, and mathematics therefore come into being via similar types of heuristic process-fundamentally a linking between a problem and the forms that will satisfy it.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Assigning invention in cases like this is difficult, and modern writings on technology recognize this. Says computing pioneer Michael Williams:

There is no such thing as "first" in any activity associated with human invention. If you add enough adjectives to a description you can always claim your own favorite. For example the ENIAC is often claimed to be the "first electronic, general purpose, large scale, digital computer" and you certainly have to add all those adjectives before you have a correct statement. If you leave any of them off, then machines such as the ABC, the Colossus, Zuse's Z3, and many others (some not even constructed such as Babbage's Analytical Engine) become candidates for being "first.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Originators, however, do not merely master functionalities and use them once and finally in their great creation. What always precedes invention is a lengthy period of accumulating functionalities and of experimenting with them on small problems as five-finger exercises. Often in this period of working with functionalities you can see hints of what originators will use. Five years before his revelation, Charles Townes had argued in a memo that microwave radio "has now been extended to such short wavelengths that it overlaps a region rich in molecular resonances, where quantum mechanical theory and spectroscopic techniques can provide aids to radio engineering." Molecular resonance was exactly what he would use to invent the maser.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“What is common to originators is not "genius" or special powers. In fact, I do not believe there is any such thing as genius. Rather it is the possession of a very large quiver of functionalities and principles. Originators are steeped in the practice and theory of the principles or phenomena they will use.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Invention at its core is mental association.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“The insight comes as a removal of blockage, often stumbled upon, either as an overall principle with a workable combination of subprinciples, or as a subprinciple that clears the way for the main principle to be used. It comes as a moment of connection, always a connection, because it connects a problem with a principle that can handle it. Strangely, for people who report such breakthroughs, the insight arrives whole, as if the subconscious had already put the parts together. And it arrives with a "knowing" that the solution is right-a feeling of appropriateness, its elegance, its extraordinary simplicity. The insight comes to an individual person, not to a team, for it wells always from an individual subconscious. And it arrives not in the midst of activities or in frenzied thought, but in moments of stillness.

This arrival is not the end of the process, it is merely a marker along the way. The concept must still be translated into a working prototype of a technology before the process is finished. Just as a composer has in mind a main theme but must orchestrate the parts that will express it, so must the originator orchestrate the working parts that will express the main concept.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“There is an analogy to this in the way you express a thought. Modern psychology and philosophy both tell us that the initial part of thinking does not take place in words. We pull up our ideas-the thought-from some unconscious level, then find a combination of words and phrases to express them. The thought exists, and its expression in words follows.

You can see this, or I should say feel this, if you speak more than one language. Suppose your company is doing business in Moscow and some of the people around the table with you speak only Russian, some only English. You have something to say and you express that thought in Russian; a moment later you express the same thought in English. The "thought" exists somehow independent of how you put it in words. You have an intention of saying something, and find words by some subconscious process to express it. The result is utterance. It can be short and spontaneous, as in a conversation; or lengthy, put together piece by piece, as with a speech you are preparing. Either way it is a combination of ideas and concepts linked together for some purpose, expressed in sentences and phrases, and ultimately in words. You are not mindful of creating a combination, but you have done that nonetheless.

It is the same with technology. The designer intends something, picks a toolbox or language for expression, envisions the concepts and functionalities needed to carry it out in his or her "mind's eye," then finds a suitable combination of components to achieve it. The envisioning can happen at one time more or less spontaneously. Or it can be drawn out, and put together in parts with much revision. We will look at how such creation works in more detail in the next chapter. But for now, notice that as with language, intention comes first and the means to fulfill it- the appropriate combination of components-fall in behind it. Design is expression.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“But whatever its variations, invention falls into two broad patterns. It may start from one end of the chain, from a given purpose or need, and find a principle to accomplish this. Or, it may start from the other end, from a phenomenon or effect, usually a newly discovered one, and envisage in it some principle of use. In either pattern the process is not complete until the principle is translated into working parts.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves