There are lots of ways to define technology. For now, though, I’m going to share one of my favourites, from a book called The Nature of Technology by economist William Brian Arthur.
The Nature of Technology is a gem of a book, precise and poetic and at times beautiful in the way it visualises technological progress.
Arthur makes “one long argument” about what technology is. His goal is to define the essence of technology. To show us the nature of the thing.
So what is the argument? I’m going to run through the key points as succinctly as I can before circling back to see why it’s relevant to this blog series. In other words — bear with me!
At the core of Arthur’s story is the idea that technology is “combinatorial”. What he means by this is that technology is built by combining pieces together — pieces that are themselves technologies. So a jet engine, for example, is built from other technologies, like a compressor and a turbine, and these in turn are made up of other technologies, like a compressor anti-stall system and a turbine blade-cooling system. And so technological progress happens mainly when we identify a new need and then combine existing technologies to meet that need.
This might all sound obvious but it’s a useful correction to the way we tend to talk about technology. It rejects, for example, the idea that technology moves forward thanks to lone inventors who ‘discover’ ‘new’ technologies. The model Arthur is proposing is a deeply social one, in which progress builds up over time (although progress is still uneven and proceeds in fits and starts).
