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John Markoff reviews W. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology in the New York Times,
The popular view is that technology is the handmaiden of science — less pure, more commercial. But in “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves,” W. Brian Arthur, an economist, reframes the relationship between science and technology as part of an effort to come up with a comprehensive theory of innovation. In Dr. Arthur’s view, the relationship between science and technology is more symbiotic than is generally conceded. Science and technology move forward together in a kind of co-evolution. And science does not lead.
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Dr. Arthur tries to explain the emergence of radical new technologies from jet engines to GPS. He correctly points out that the jet engine did not arise from the steady accretion of small improvements in piston engines nor did the modern computer burst forth as the next generation of mechanical calculator.
He points to the human propensity to solve problems as the force that leads to new generations of technology through recombination of existing technologies. Technology is “alive” in the sense that a coral reef is alive. The reef is an ecological system with many species, and technology in the broadest sense is an elaborate and constantly changing structure made up of thousands of discrete technologies, themselves composed of separate technologies.
Generally speaking it is, of course, correct. But when one looks at the emergence of those radical new technologies mentioned above, one can see straight away they all originated either directly in military reseach labs or as government-contracted research: jet engines were developed in conjuction with the new fighter planes, GPS was developed in the 1970s by the Dept. of Defence satellite navigation, the first computers were built at the Penn. Univ. for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Lab. The same could be said about the predecessor of today’s Internet, which was the packet-switched ARPAnet, also designed and built originally for the military. Therefore , in my opinion, they cannot be compared with purely civilian, commercial technologies, since the military have other funding, other experimental facilities, other priorities, other decision-making and are dependent on the defence policies and politics. By the way, the same could be said about the radar and the first nuclear reactors. Let’s see what the newly propsed ARPA-E will bring in terms of developing new energy technologies.
Commercial examples of the radical new technologies could be, for example, compact disks/DVDs which did not arise from the gramophone records, semiconductor chips did not arise from the electronic tubes, cell phones did not emerge from the plane, old telephones. What Dr. Arthur has not mentioned is not only recombination of existing technologies, but the convergence of existing technologies, sometimes called the triple play (internet, TV/video-on-demand, IP telephony) and the quadruple play: the same as the previos example plus the cell phone. The new generation of the cell phones contains also GPS.
The latest initiative is NBIC: nano-bio-info-cogno. U.S. government studies now recognize that the convergence of the NBIC technologies can vastly “improve human performance over the next ten to twenty years.”