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The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves |  | Author: W. Brian Arthur
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
List Price: $27.00
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Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 41429
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.9 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 16
 Clear thinking on how technology evolves and shapes the economy September 7, 2009
Steven Forth (Cambridge MA)
27 out of 29 found this review helpful
An engaging and thought provoking book, Arthur provides a powerful framework for understanding how technologies evolve and are a key driver of productivity growth. According to Arthur (and he does a good job of demonstrating his case), technologies are based on interactions with natural phenomena that are composed into modular systems of components that grow into domains with their own conceptual languages. Because the systems are modular, they can leverage the combinatorial explosion and once a certain technology reaches a critical mass of components and interfaces it can evolve rapidly, entering new domains and exposing new natural phenomena to interact with. Arthur provides many examples that are interesting in their own right - from the evolution of airplanes and turbojets to genetics and even gearing systems or sorting algorithms.
One test of a book is if it draws you towards additional reading that you might not have otherwise discovered. Arthur's book caused me to run out (to Amazon) and order Colum Gilfillan's 1935 book Inventing the Ship and decide to finally read Donald McKenzie's book Knowing Machines. Thank you.
I do have a few quibbles. I think Arthur makes a serious conceptual error in making natural phenomena the `genes' of his system. I understand the temptation, but I think the metaphor is based on a misunderstanding of how genes actually function in living systems (see for example Lenny Moss' book What Genes Can't Do). The primitive elements in technology evolution can not be natural phenomena themselves but how humans (and other species) interact with these phenomena. I am not sure how to formalize this, probably something like a `theory in use" of cause and effect for natural phenomena, not something as formal as a scientific theory, more the rules of thumb and satisficing that we use as we interact with our world.
There are also some conceptual frameworks that could be used to complement Arthur's approach. I think the most important of these is that of design spaces, and the idea that technological progress is based on the expansion of and improved search over design spaces. For me, Stuart Kaufmann's work is foundational here. Other work that complements Arthur's is Baldwin and Clark's wonderful book Design Rules (I hope that Volume 2 actually comes out one day) and the many applications of design patterns that are spreading from Christopher Alexander to the software industry to many other areas of endeavor. I personally find work in mereology useful in thinking about part-whole relationships and in converting combinatorial explosions into navigable design spaces, see for example Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi on Parts and Places.
Arthur's approach is going to need some formalization and a lot more application, but I think it proposes a useful way forward. It will be interesting to see how these ideas are applied to technologies such as markets and financial instruments, as well as new designs for organizations such as the fourth sector.
Powerful thinking September 11, 2009
David Forrest (Canada)
24 out of 27 found this review helpful
Books like this are published rarely -- maybe once every 10 years. Brian Arthur has done a masterful job of presenting new ideas about technological evolution and innovation in a way that is engaging and accessible. The Nature of Technology is beautifully written. That's a recommendation in itself, but it is the new thinking that is most significant. Arthur explains how each of our technologies is a system, assembled from other technologies... ad infinitum. Every component provides an essential function in support of the whole. As components improve, or new components are substituted with enhanced functionality, the system evolves. Our technologies are now deep and complex, with many nested levels.
Arthur's model nicely explains accelerating change. In a simpler pre-industrial world, we had fewer things to combine. Today we have a seemingly infinite number of technologies to work with, and can combine them in an infinite number of ways. Add a new technology and the combinations multiply. One reflects on how quickly the Internet has been embedded in other technologies in ways that have created widespread systemic change.
Technology, Arthur says, harnesses phenomena to deliver its functionality. We can see this in the evolution of computers, where calculating machines were first based on mechanics, later computers harnessed the forces of electricity and magnetism, and researchers today grapple with the challenge of creating a computer based on the counter-intuitive laws of quantum physics. This dream has not yet been realized, but it illustrates Arthur's principle. Scientists and engineers are working on multiple fronts to transform ethereal quantum phenomena into a reliable and concrete computational machine.
Arthur's framework leads in some interesting new directions. While computers use natural phenomena to perform their function, they create new phenomena -- in the form of information -- that can be used in other ways. Emergent phenomena created by our technologies are fertile ground for still further innovation.
It's a rare book that presents new ideas on every page. This is one of them. The result is an important new framework for thinking about technology and how it evolves.
An Ontology of Technological Innovation December 7, 2009
Mark Gibson (United Kingdom)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
W. Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology is an important book for technologists, entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, in fact anyone in the business of creating, marketing or selling innovative technology.
This book is an ontology of the process of technological innovation and is a major contribution to the understanding of the evolution of technology and its influence on our economy and civilization.
I write this review as a layman, from my perspective of the observer of technological change over 40 years in the computer industry, initially in engineering, then sales and marketing and for the past 5 years focused on solving sales and marketing performance problems with innovative technology companies.
There is a clue in the title as to the main arguments in the book and few others in the World have the background to conceive, advance and prove such a powerful argument in just 216 pages. Brian Arthur is an engineer, mathematician, system theorist, economist and more recently a diligent scholar of Darwinian evolution.
Arthur coins a new phrase to describe the advances in technology as "combinatorial evolution"; whereas in nature evolution is biological and subject to the Darwinian laws of natural selection, technology evolves as a result of combinations of existing technologies and methods to create new innovations, the critical ingredient in the process is human knowledge and ingenuity.
Once a technology is created, it is then subject to Darwinian evolution, whereby the innovation advances through refinement of its component systems and further innovation and addition, the weaker ideas discarded to become museum artifacts and the process continually advancing.
Arthur examines the development path that produced the steam engine, the jet engine, the laser printer, the development of radar, the cyclotron, DNA and many other innovations including the computer to create a logical and balanced argument that is self evident, yet until this book, was untold. He also cites the great thinkers on the subject of technology including Joseph Schumpeter, Martin Heidegger, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and Thomas Khun.
Written in a clear, logical and carefully constructed prose, Arthur reminds us that our economy is the sum and manifestation of our technology and that it is becoming generative with the accelerating rate of technological change. "It's focus is shifting from optimizing fixed operations into creating new combinations, new configurable offerings." For high-technology entrepreneurs in startups, he captures the problems of both the innovator and the investor;
* he doesn't know if the new technology will work
* nor how well it will be received,
* who the competitors will be
* what government regulations will apply
"The environment around the launching of a new combinatorial business is not merely uncertain: particular aspects are unknown"
Finally he suggests "in the generative economy, management derives its competitive advantage not from its stock of resources and its ability to transform these into finished goods, but from its ability to translate its stock of deep expertise into ever new strategic combinations."
Stimulating, thought-provoking and highly recommended!
Better understanding the complex September 24, 2009
D. Baxter (Santa Fe NM)
9 out of 10 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.
Seminal Understanding November 11, 2009
Lance L. Trebesch
6 out of 6 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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 16
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