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

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

Novel technologies must somehow arise by combination of existing technologies.

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.

found meditations on technology from engineers and French philosophers, studies of the adoption and diffusion of technologies, theories of how society influences technology and technology influences society, and observations on how technologies are designed and subsequently develop.

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

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

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

the Bessemer process,

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