The Nature of Technology
I’ve just got round to writing up my notes on The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves
p.2 “Technologies in other words consisted of other technologies, they arose as combinations of other technologies…But it meant, I realized, that if new technologies were constructed from existing ones, then considered collectively technology created itself.”
p.3 “Technologies consisted of parts - assemblies and subassemblies - that were themselves technologies. So technologies had a recursive structure.”
“And every technology, I realized, was based upon a phenomenen, some effect it exploited, usually several.”
On how technologies are combinations of other technologies…
p.21 “If we put these two pieces together, that novel technologies arise by combination of existing technologies and that (therefore) existing technologies beget future technologies, can we arrive at a mechanism for the evolution of technology?”
p.25 “Slowly, at a pace measured in decades, we are shifting from technologies that produced fixed physical outputs to technologies whose main character is that they can be combined and configured endlessly for fresh purposes.”
Talking about domains of technology and Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon he says…
p.74 “You recognize them as mid-1800s because of the component sets they draw from: the iron-place cladding of the craft; the artillery cannon that hurls it into space; the brick-and-wrought-iron structures that house the venture. Such component sets and the way they are used do not just reflect the style of the times, the define the style of the times.”
On insight and the origins of technologies:
p.116 “It comes as a moment of connection, always a connection, because it connects a problem with a principle that can handle it…And it not in the midst of activities or in frenzied thoughts, but in moments of stillness.”
p.128 “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 with a complete set of principles that reproduces these.”
And concludes with…
p.209 “The economy, in a word, is becoming generative. Its focus is shifting from optimising fixed operations into creating new combinations, new configurable offerings.”
p.213 “It is reinforced nonetheless by the qualities of modern technology: its connectedness, its adaptiveness, its tendency to evolve its organic quality. Its messy vitality.”
There’s also a lovely little sketch of how technology has evolved in human history, but you”ll have to buy the book for that. Fairly interesting overall but not as compelling as I had hoped.
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