The nature of technology
The Nature of Technology will change the way you think about this fundamental subject forever. W. Brian Arthur's many years of thinking and writing about technology have culminated in a unique understanding of his subject. Here he examines the nature of technology itself: what is it and how does it evolve? Giving rare insights into the evolution of specific technologies and a new framework for thinking about others, every sentence points to some further truth and fascination. At a time when we are ever more reliant on technological solutions for the world's problems, it is extraordinary how little we actually understand the processes that lead to innovation and invention. Until now. This will be a landmark book that will define its subject, and inspire people to think about technology in depth for the very first time.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
8mentions
4people
2016–2026years
88% recommend13% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- W Brian Arthur's book "The Nature of Technology" provides a framework for classifying new technology as elemental vs innovative that I find helpful. For example the Huntley-Mcllroy diff operates on the phenomenon that ordered correspondence survives editing. That was an invention (discovery of a natural phenomenon and a means to harness it). Myers diff improves the performance by exploiting the fact that text changes are sparse. That's innovation. A python app using libdiff, that's engineering. And then you might say in terms of "descendants": invention > innovation > engineering. But it's just a perspective.
- The Nature of Technology is a book by complexity theorist, Brian Arthur.
In the book, Brian Arthur describes technology and how it evolves.
You might find the book interesting if;
a) You want to develop a few frameworks that will help you develop insights on how to come up with possible inventions or tech start-up ideas.
b) You are interested in how to come up with policies or strategies for corporate research departments, educational institutions, or government policies that will foster the creation of new technology.
c) You want to comprehensively understand if technological progress will slow down or speed up in the future.
In this blog post, I describe a few takeaways from the book that answer those questions and hopefully inspire you to pick it up.
- Lewis Mumford's Books;
- Technics & Civilization
- The Culture of Cities
- The Story of Utopias
Lewis Mumford talks about technology, but from an anthropological pint of view.
Another book I would recommend is The Nature of Technology by Brian Arthur
The other I would recommend is James Burk's Connections he's has some books but I but the documentary is highly recommended.
- 1. The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberger
2. The Nature of Technology by Brian Arthur
3. (Not a book but documentary) Connections by James Burk
4. Books by James Burk [0]
- The innovator's dilemma
Systemantics
A farewell to entropy
The nature of technology - what it is and how it evolves
On being wrong
- Invention, creativity, and the benefits of invention are a topic for much exploration.
The 34 inventions mentioned are a small set -- that's just at the threshold of large-sample statistics for normally distributed data, and the datapoints here may well not bbe.
For a larger set of inventions, Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China might provide an interesting basis. Under development for over half a century, the 27 volume work (several still in process) details thousands of years of innovation in China, in excruciating detail. The work's Wikipedia entry alone is staggering. Needham's biography has been written by Simon Winchester, and is highly recommended.
There are numerous books on innovation I recommend. There's What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelley and W. Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology both cover inventions and inventing.
Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016) looks at the era of invention and development since 1870. Gordon writes in great detail, but very readably, of the tranformation of the US landscape, cityscape, and suburbscape over this period, focusing especially on domestic living and lifestyle, transportation, food, medicine and health, work, communications, and entertainment. I've got disagreements with some of Gordon's economic thinking, but his history is solid.
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