The Nature of Technology
What It Is and How It Evolves
(Sprache: Englisch)
Originally published in hardcover by Free Press in 2009.
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Originally published in hardcover by Free Press in 2009.
Klappentext zu „The Nature of Technology “
"More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being," says W. Brian Arthur. Yet despite technology's irrefutable importance in our daily lives, until now its major questions have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions and more, setting forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology. The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology's origins and evolution. Achieving for the development 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. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives. The Nature of Technology is a classic for our times.
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The Nature of Technology 1 QUESTIONS
I have many attitudes to technology. I use it and take it for granted. I enjoy it and occasionally am frustrated by it. And I am vaguely suspicious of what it is doing to our lives. But I am also caught up by a wonderment at technology, a wonderment at what we humans have created. Recently researchers at the University of Pittsburgh developed a technology that allows a monkey with tiny electrodes implanted in its brain to control a mechanical arm. The monkey does this not by twitching or blinking or making any slight movement, but by using its thoughts alone.
The workings behind this technology are not enormously complicated. They consist of standard parts from the electronics and robotics repertoires: circuits that detect the monkey's brain signals, processors and mechanical actuators that translate these into mechanical motions, other circuits that feed back a sense of touch to the monkey's brain. The real accomplishment has been to understand the neural circuits that "intend" motion, and tap into these appropriately so that the monkey can use these circuits to move the arm. The technology has obvious promise for impaired people. But that is not what causes me wonder. I wonder that we can put together circuits and mechanical linkages-in the end, pieces of silicon and copper wiring, strips of metal and small gears-so that machinery moves in response to thought and to thought alone.
I wonder at other things we can do. We put together pieces of metal alloy and fossil fuel so that we hurtle through the sky at close to the speed of sound; we organize tiny signals from the spins of atomic nuclei to make images of the neural circuits inside our brains; we organize biological objects-enzymes-to snip tiny slivers of molecules from DNA and paste them into bacterial cells. Two or three centuries ago we could not have imagined these powers. And I find them, and how we have come by them, a wonder.
Most of us do not stop
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to ponder technology. It is something we find useful but that fades to the background of our world. Yet-and this is another source of wonder for me-this thing that fades to the background of our world also creates that world. It creates the realm our lives inhabit. If you woke some morning and found that by some odd magic the technologies that have appeared in the last six hundred years had suddenly vanished: if you found that your toilet and stove and computer and automobile had disappeared, and along with these, steel and concrete buildings, mass production, public hygiene, the steam engine, modern agriculture, the joint stock company, and the printing press, you would find that our modern world had also disappeared. You-or we, if this strange happening befell all of us-would still be left with our ideas and culture, and with our children and spouses. And we would still have technologies. We would have water mills, and foundries, and oxcarts; and coarse linens, and hooded cloaks, and sophisticated techniques for building cathedrals. But we would once again be medieval.
Technology is what separates us from the Middle Ages; indeed it is what separates us from the way we lived 50,000 or more years ago. More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being.
What then is this thing of such importance? What is technology in its nature, in its deepest essence? Where does it come from? And how does it evolve?
These are the questions I will ask in this book.
Maybe we can simply accept technology and not concern ourselves much with the deeper questions behind it. But I believe-in fact I believe fervently-that it is important to understand what technology is and how it comes to be. This is not just bec
Technology is what separates us from the Middle Ages; indeed it is what separates us from the way we lived 50,000 or more years ago. More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being.
What then is this thing of such importance? What is technology in its nature, in its deepest essence? Where does it come from? And how does it evolve?
These are the questions I will ask in this book.
Maybe we can simply accept technology and not concern ourselves much with the deeper questions behind it. But I believe-in fact I believe fervently-that it is important to understand what technology is and how it comes to be. This is not just bec
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Autoren-Porträt von W. Brian Arthur
W. Brian Arthur is an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a Visiting Researcher at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Formerly he was Morrison Professor of Economics and Population Studies at Stanford University. One of the pioneers of complexity theory, he also formulated the influential "theory of increasing returns," which offered a paradigm-changing explanation of why some high-tech companies achieve breakaway success. Former director of PARC John Seeley Brown has said of him, "Hundreds of millions of dollars slosh around Silicon Valley every day based on Arthur's ideas." Arthur is the recipient of the International Schumpeter Prize in Economics, and the inaugural Lagrange Prize in Complexity Science. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: W. Brian Arthur
- 2011, 256 Seiten, Maße: 14,1 x 21,6 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Free Press
- ISBN-10: 1416544062
- ISBN-13: 9781416544067
- Erscheinungsdatum: 28.02.2011
Sprache:
Englisch
Rezension zu „The Nature of Technology “
"Provocative and engaging...Arthur's theory captures many well-known features of technological change [and] also answers interesting questions."--"Nature"
Pressezitat
"...enlightening and stimulating, enhanced by a remarkable diversity of historical examples...The book invites comparison to work by Thomas Kuhn...Economists, social scientists, engineers and scientists all may come to regard it as a landmark." -Science
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