The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

Brian Arthur deserves great credit for this exploration of what technology is, where it comes from and how it evolves. It's a most interesting account and I particularly enjoyed thinking about his concluding observations that we are, in a way, slaves to the technology that we invent.I did wonder, however, whether Arthur had pulled a bit of a semantic trick, in that much of what he says about technology seems to be a restatement of what has already been said about systems in general, and in particular about purposeful systems, using the specific terminology of technology based systems. In fact I felt that the whole area of semantics was the most difficult aspect of the book. It would have been much better for having a glossary and for Arthur to have been a bit more rigorous in his use of terms. It's clear that he has a model in his head, but he does not reveal it explicitly except in prose, so we are left having to infer it. Either the model isn't a complete one that he's happy with, so he hides it from us, or it's a good semantic model and we have to waste time recreating it to clearly understand what he's saying. A couple of diagrams would have resolved the matter, leaving me to suspect the former.But these criticisms should not detract from my enormous gratitude and admiration for the thinking that has gone into this endeavour to explain what we see around us. It is an entertainingly and, with caveats, beautifully written account. I am glad he gave me the opportunity to follow his journey.

A distinctive and original theoretical analysis of the lifecycle of a) technologies (e.g. physical devices) and b) technological domains (e.g. electronics). The author makes a good job of analysing how technologies emerge and evolve, with an impressive array of ideas and quotable insights. However, the book becomes too ambitious in attempting to create an over-arching theory of the relationship between technology and economics, which surely deserves a separate treatment. More generally this book needed stronger editing, not least because it's both repetitive and verbose. I would nevertheless recommend it to anyone with an interest in the theory and philosophy of technology.

Arthur's argument, that technology begets further technology, and that we are living in a moment where such is the power and scope of technologies that we should be prepared for exponential development is a bit too rosy for my taste. Whilst not blind to the faults of technology, and often very perceptive about its limitations, he places too much faith in how the engineering process meets the science with the result of human happiness. Inadvertently, this throws up some of the problems of technology without intending to do so: arbitrary implementation of technology unsuited to the kind of problem solving he thinks engineers are so good at, the means by which bad technology distorts the direction of scientific effort to create worse technology, or the impact of unplanned technological solutions on the lives of humans. All this is framed in a definition of technology that seems unacceptably broad, and fails to distinguish between conceptual worlds and practical function. His three main principles of technological recursion, combination and exploitation foreshadow the closer relationship between business and technology than any kind of underlying science. This turns into an argument that implies some technological triumphalism: technology apparently makes us what we are (in the conceptual sense that, by Arthur's definition, every complex set of ideas is a technology), and yet we see technologies of the practical kind deployed in many ways that reflect a creativity not possessed by the engineers that generated them.At his best, Arthur is well informed about engineering process, and one can only marvel at the breadth of his frame of reference. This is a serious book for anyone interested in technology and how it develops, even if I don't agree with its sanguine conclusions.

Although is is well thought through and considered, I feel it would be possible to 'get to the point' in a simpler and more succinct way.

I was expecting a book by Brian Arthur to contain more imaginative insights than are contained here. Arthur has produced some excellent working papers and is an excellent scientist. But I found very few stimulating ideas in this book.