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The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves |  |
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The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves | |
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.
编辑推荐 "Brian Arthur's brilliantly original analysis of how technology develops and evolves reminds me of Euclid's Geometry -- it's clear, simple and seemingly self-evident now that a master has spent years working it out. The Nature of Technology is a seminal work, thrilling to read and rich in implications for business as well as engineering and the social sciences." -- Richard Rhodes, Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction for The Making of the Atomic Bomb^"The Nature of Technology is the most important book on technology and the economy since Schumpeter. In clear, lucid prose and with fascinating examples, Arthur describes how technology 'creates itself' in an evolutionary process that has taken our world from stone tools to iPods. A work of deep and lasting importance that deserves to be widely read -- you will not think about technology the same way again." -- Eric D. Beinhocker, author of The Origin of Wealth^"The refreshing clarity that Brian Arthur brings to the most overwhelming force in the universe will benefit anyone trying to tame technology -- critics, eager boosters, and the perplexed alike." -- Kevin Kelly, author of New Rules for the New Economy^"Hundreds of millions of dollars slosh around Silicon Valley every day based on Brian Arthur's ideas." -- John Seeley Brown, former director of PARC^"We launched Java based on Brian Arthur's ideas." -- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
文摘
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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 wonde
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