A New Book on Technology

Source: "TECHNOLOGY: Under Microscope and Macroscope," Michael N. Alexander
Science 19 February 2010:
Vol. 327. no. 5968, pp. 960 - 961
DOI: 10.1126/science.1187156

I quote from this review of Brian Arthur's new book, The Nature of Technology What It Is and How It Evolves:

First, all technologies are combinations. This may seem self-evident to readers of Science, especially those who employ instruments in their own work. Spectrometers, for example, are composed of parts that are technology products (lenses, mirrors, gratings, actuators, etc.). But on reflection, one realizes that the parts are themselves miniature technologies; so are their subparts, sub-subparts, and so on (Arthur's second principle). Moreover, each "technology is a phenomenon captured and put to use" (his third principle).

It follows that technologies have hierarchical structures and that "[t]echnologies at a higher level direct or ‘program’ (as in a computer program) technologies at lower levels" to fulfill human purposes. Their interacting constituents, especially in complex, composite technologies like jet engines, can even have properties akin to metabolism. A naval aircraft carrier group becomes, via this reasoning, a technology composed of ships and their multiple levels of constituent technologies. This is a novel and powerful perspective, for we rarely if ever regard organizational arrangements as technologies.......

Arthur argues plausibly that legal codes, institutions, and organizations should then be regarded as akin to technologies. But placing them in the same category as laser printers or even naval flotillas would unduly strain the concept of technology. Therefore, Arthur assigns these social technologies to a new category, "purposed systems." Making a distinction between technologies and purposed systems may seem like medieval scholasticism, but in fact it is astute.

Comment: Brian Arthur has been proven worth listening to in the past, so I am going to give this book a chance. Its value will of course depend not on the postulates that he sets forth but on the analytic power of the analytic structure he builds upon them. JAD