W. Brian Arthur -- The nature of technology
=============================================

In many respects, this is a book of propositions about what
technology is and how it develops or evolves. For example: (1)
Technology uses phenomena, i.e. things in (some) real world.  (2)
Technologies are built up out of other (earlier?) technologies.  (3)
A technology is a solution to one or more problems.  (4) A
technology has a purpose, in other words, to is an attempt to fill a
need.  (5) Technologies create opportunity niches, i.e. a technology
creates needs that other technologies can be created to fill.

Arthur mentions briefly, but does not dwell on one consequence of
the ideas and technology creates needs and that technologies are
created to satisfy the needs created by other technologies, which is
the question of whose needs are being satisfied.  Perhaps they are
not ours.  Perhaps technology, i.e. the collective technology
organism, is evolving to satisfy its own needs, not ours.  I have to
start to wonder whether we human users are just becoming the excuse
for technology's existence and development; and I wonder whether
we'll become somewhat run over in the process.

One thing that Arthur does not consider is that perhaps we and our
technologies are becoming too successful.  Perhaps as our
technologies become increasingly powerful, we will have *too* much
control over Nature and other humans.  We have ample evidence that
we are able to resist using power when we have it.  And, we have
developed the power to use more and more of the available resources,
until acquiring those resources became too costly and that society
collapsed.  We can look at these books for an analysis of that: (1)
"Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", by Jared
Diamond; (2) "The Collapse of Complex Societies", by Joseph A.
Tainter.  The book "The World Without Us", by Alan Weisman is also a
very interesting read in this respect.

Arthur's main point and agenda is to explain how we can understand
the progression and development of all societies.  The main points
of that understanding are something like these: (1) New technologies
are created out of combinations of existing technologies.  (2) New
technologies are responses to needs and problems.  (3) New
technologies create new needs and problems to be solved (what Arthur
calls new "opportunity niches"), and, if fact, this may and often
does result in a cascade of creation of new technologies.  (4) New
technologies cause the disappearance of old, existing technologies
(e.g., by making them unneeded), which, as with the creation
sequences, may result in cascades of redundancy and elimination of
technologies.  (5) These cascades of creation and elimination of
technologies are contingent, i.e., although this activity may be
somewhat deterministic, it is not predictable, and is chaotic in
some sense.

Arthur is reasonably careful and diligent in illustrating his points
with examples, usually by describing how a particular technology
illustrates a point he is trying to make about technology in
general.  It's important that he does so, because his level of
discussion is a very abstract and general one.

Arthur tries to make the connection between technologies and an
economy.  An economy, he claims, is a creation out of or is built
upon the technologies that create the goods and services and wealth
that make up the economy.

Arthur wants to claim that technologies (i.e., the cluster of
technologies) in a society are self-creating ("autopoietic" is the
word he uses); the technologies that make up a society's goods,
services, and wealth are self-creating.  It's an organism that grows
outward and maybe inward and downward, too.  Possibly because of
this, he frequently describes technology in terms such as
"structural deepening", "building out", etc.  And, because of his
emphasis on growth and organism, Arthur believes that the collective
technologies evolve, although since that evolution is not a
biological or genetic evolution, it's a bit difficult to make out
what the term "evolution" adds to the discussion.

Arthur does try to make the process (of evolution of technology)
clear by giving a series of steps that a cluster of technologies
proceed through.  (see p. 178 in the 2009 edition; chapter 8,
"Revolutions and redomainings").  If you follow that recipe, which
Arthur calls algorithmic, you get a reasonably clear idea of how
Arthur believes this process goes.  He thinks these steps are
discrete, whereas I'd say that they blend together in all kinds of
complex ways, although I suppose that if you analyze the process
into small enough parts, you will find pieces that seem discrete and
separate at some level.

The steps in that process go something like this: (1) a new
technology appears; (2) it replaces some existing technologies; (3)
the new technology creates needs and opportunity niches for yet
newer technologies; (4) the disappearance of old technologies
eliminates the need for still other technologies and they disappear
and so on; (5) the new technology is used in still newer
technologies; (6) the economy readjusts to these steps, causing
changes in costs, prices, and incentives.  (p. 178)

If you follow Arthur's discussion, then you are, I believe, drawn to
a pattern of thinking about changes in technologies that is based on
challenge and response, problem and solution, needs or opportunity
niches and attempts to fill those needs.

Arthur stresses the point that understanding a technology requires
that we think recursively and that we do a recursive analysis.  We
need to think about how a technology is built out of and supported
by other technologies, which are in turn built out of and supported
by still other technologies.  This recursion works in several ways:
(1) a complex technology may be composed of components that are
technologies and which in turn are made up of other components.
And, (2) a technology may be supported or enabled by other
technologies which are in turn supported by other technologies.
This branching pattern or network forms a lattice, not a tree, that
is, we cannot say that any given technology has a single parent (it
does not support only one technology nor is it supported by only one
technology).

Arthur is associated with the Santa Fe Institute, where they do lots
of thinking about chaos theory, so it is natural for him to think in
terms of dynamic systems.  Thus, for him, the process of evolving
technologies form a system and that system is (1) dynamic; (2)
poised for change; (3) autopoietic or self-creating; (4) exhibits
"creative disruption" (cf. Joseph Schumpeter); (5) sets up trains or
chains of (branching) technological accommodations and new problems
and new solutions; (6) is always in a process self-creation.

For those of us who want to get above the level of thinking only
about individual technologies (though that's interesting and
valuable, too), this is a fascinating book.

09/08/2015

.. vim:ft=rst:fo+=a: