Waubonsee Community College

The nature of technology, what it is and how it evolves, W. Brian Arthur

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-231) and index

index present

non fiction

The nature of technology

bibliography

298776864

W. Brian Arthur

what it is and how it evolves

From the Publisher: "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

Questions -- Combination and structure -- Phenomena -- Domains, or worlds entered for what can be accomplished there -- Engineering and its solutions -- The origin of technologies -- Structural deepening -- Revolutions and redomainings -- The mechanisms of evolution -- The economy evolving as its technologies evolve -- Where do we stand with this creation of ours?