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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:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 13069
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
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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| • | ISBN13: 9781416544050 | | • | Condition: USED - VERY GOOD | | • | Notes: |
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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 13
 Clear thinking on how technology evolves and shapes the economy September 7, 2009
Steven Forth (Cambridge MA)
20 out of 22 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)
21 out of 24 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.
Better understanding the complex September 24, 2009
D. Baxter (Santa Fe NM)
8 out of 9 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.
Very, very special September 20, 2009
Brigitte Jordan (Palo Alto, CA USA)
13 out of 16 found this review helpful
I have just had the pleasure of reading Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. This book is an amazing reconceptualization of the growth and expansion of technology and technology domains and what that means in and to the economy, society and, indeed, our future lifescapes. It is a major intellectual event that reshapes contemporary understandings of technology and technology management.
It certainly will be declared a classic - no doubt about that - and it is quite easy to predict that it will quickly become required reading for technology managers and technology students globally.
I'm impressed with the beauty of Brian's writing, the depth of his insights, and the ways in which he links technology and its development to the worlds of music, of poetry, mathematics, business and everyday life. When even a non-techie like me (I'm an anthropologist) is fascinated by a book on technology you can be sure it is very, very special.
Don't miss it!
Brigitte Jordan, Ph.D.
Consulting Principal Scientist
Palo Alto Research Center/CSL
CONSOLIDATING VIEWS November 2, 2009
José Porfiro da Silva (Rio Branco, Acre, Brazil)
5 out of 5 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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
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