W. Brian Arthur, who is both an engineer and an economist, has thought a lot about the logic of technology. The strength of this book resides in how he pulls his observations together into a clear and coherent theory of how technology evolves. Arthur repeats himself to some degree throughout (one could read just the preface and the last chapter to grasp the main elements of his theory), but the prose is relatively jargon-free and straight-forward.
All technologies, as Arthur defines them, (1) entail a means to fulfill a human purpose and (2) involve an assemblage of practices and components (both devices and methods). "Technology" can also mean the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture.
The essence of technology, Arthur suggests, is a phenomenon or set of phenomena captured and put to use, a programming of one or more of "truisms of nature" to our purposes (for example, burning certain fuels produces energy we can employ in many ways). The history of technology, he proposes, is one of capturing finer and finer phenomena, enabled by earlier technology.
As he sees it, technology provides a "vocabulary" of elements that can be put together in endlessly new ways for novel purposes. Technology is "autopoietic," or self-creating, Arthur believes. It creates new opportunity niches and new problems, which call forth still more new technology. The economy is in a state of perpetual novelty, unsatisfied, roiling constantly.
According to Arthur, technologies often group together into "domains" based on the natural effects they exploit. He believes that, "A change in domain is the main way in which technology progresses" (for example, a shift from mechanical to electronic controls, or from analogue to digital electronics).
Just because we have a theory for how technology evolves does not mean, however, that we can accurately predict the technological future. There are many indeterminacies, Arthur says. He recognizes that the investment and publicity environments, for example, matter in determining what gets developed and adopted, and at what speed, but he doesn't say much about these matters.
Yet if technology has a logic of its own, why does it proceed at a different pace and on a different course in different places? The obvious answer is, I believe, that culture matters too, in all its manifestations (business systems, religious beliefs, governance structures, and so on). To be fair, Arthur says he made a deliberate choice to focus on the logic of technical creation (and not on the people or institutions who do it), and he treats societal institutions themselves as technologies, but as a consequence he sometimes comes across as too techno-centric.
While Arthur does an admirable job of presenting historical examples (drawn mostly from the past two centuries), he has been selective, naturally latching on to cases that support his contentions. Do not expect a broad history of technology in the sense of a systematic survey of a wide range of developments in any given historical era. Thus we don't know for sure from this volume alone how well his theory might hold up against a more inclusive consideration of historical developments, especially across cultures.
Because Arthur's concept of technology is so broad (pretty much anything that fulfills a human purpose counts), it raises several boundary issues; for example, where should one draw the line between science and technology? He concedes that it would be stretching things to call Newton's explanations, for instance, "technologies" and proposes that it is better to think of scientific explanations as purposed systems that are "cousins" to technology.
In the end, though, such fuzziness may not be much of a detriment, because Arthur's broad conceptions lead him to provocative insights. For example, he rejects the idea that technology is simply the application of science and he observes that many technologies came into being without drawing on science directly at all (for example, powered flight). It was only when the phenomena driving technology began to fall below the threshold of unaided human observation (such as electrical and chemical phenomena) that science began to play more of a role, he proposes.
Arthur also has engaging things to say about similarities and differences between technology and biology, about how engineers work, about how economic "needs" are generated, about our conceptions of nature versus technology, and about several other related subjects that should be of interest to many general readers.
