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

Technologies somehow must come into being as fresh combinations of what already exists.

We are moving from an era where machines enhanced the natural—speeded our movements, saved our sweat, stitched our clothing—to one that brings in technologies that resemble or replace the natural—genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, medical devices implanted in our bodies.

Therefore, collectively technology advanced by capturing phenomena and putting them to use.

Technologies in other words consisted of other technologies, they arose as combinations of other technologies.

And every technology, I realized, was based upon a phenomenon, some effect it exploited, and usually several.

Technologies, in the form of new technical products and processes—think of early automobiles—improved with use and adoption, and this led to further use and adoption, creating a positive feedback or increasing returns to adoption.

And so the story of this century will be about the clash between what technology offers and what we feel comfortable with.

The word “evolution” has two general meanings. One is the gradual development of something, as with the “evolution” of ballet or the English madrigal. I will call this evolution in the narrow sense, or more usually “development.” The other is the process by which all objects of some class are related by ties of common descent from the collection of

I will call this mechanism evolution by combination, or more succinctly, combinatorial evolution.