W. Brian Arthur > Quotes

“In its collective sense, technology is not merely a catalog of individual parts. It is a metabolic chemistry, an almost limitless collective of entities that interact to produce new entities-and further needs. And we should not forget that needs drive the evolution of technology every bit as much as the possibilities for fresh combination and the unearthing of phenomena. Without the presence of unmet needs, nothing novel would appear in technology.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“I will give technology three definitions that we will use throughout the book.

The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose. For some technologies-oil refining-the purpose is explicit. For others- the computer-the purpose may be hazy, multiple, and changing. As a means, a technology may be a method or process or device: a particular speech recognition algorithm, or a filtration process in chemical engineering, or a diesel engine. it may be simple: a roller bearing. Or it may be complicated: a wavelength division multiplexer. It may be material: an electrical generator. Or it may be nonmaterial: a digital compression algorithm. Whichever it is, it is always a means to carry out a human purpose.

The second definition I will allow is a plural one: technology as an assemblage of practices and components. This covers technologies such as electronics or biotechnology that are collections or toolboxes of individual technologies and practices. Strictly speaking, we should call these bodies of technology. But this plural usage is widespread, so I will allow it here.

I will also allow a third meaning. This is technology as the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture. Here we are back to the Oxford's collection of mechanical arts, or as Webster's puts it, "The totality of the means employed by a people to provide itself with the objects of material culture." We use this collective meaning when we blame "technology" for speeding up our lives, or talk of "technology" as a hope for mankind. Sometimes this meaning shades off into technology as a collective activity, as in "technology is what Silicon Valley is all about." I will allow this too as a variant of technology's collective meaning. The technology thinker Kevin Kelly calls this totality the "technium," and I like this word. But in this book I prefer to simply use "technology" for this because that reflects common use.

The reason we need three meanings is that each points to technology in a different sense, a different category, from the others. Each category comes into being differently and evolves differently. A technology-singular-the steam engine-originates as a new concept and develops by modifying its internal parts. A technology-plural-electronics-comes into being by building around certain phenomena and components and develops by changing its parts and practices. And technology-general, the whole collection of all technologies that have ever existed past and present, originates from the use of natural phenomena and builds up organically with new elements forming by combination from old ones.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“At the creative heart of invention lies appropriation, some sort of mental borrowing that comes in the form of a half-conscious suggestion.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Origination in scientific theorizing, as in technology, is at bottom a linking-a linking of the observational givens of a problem with a principle (a conceptual insight) that roughly suggests these, and eventually a complete set of principles that reproduce these.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“My plan is to start from a completely blank state, taking nothing about technology for granted. I will build the argument piece by piece from three fundamental principles. The first will be the one I have been talking about: that technologies, all technologies, are combinations. This simply means that individual technologies are constructed or put together-combined-from components or assemblies or subsystems at hand. The second will be that each component of technology is itself in miniature a technology. This sounds odd and I will have to justify it, but for now think of it as meaning that because components carry out specific purposes just as overall technologies do, they too qualify as technologies. And the third fundamental principle will be that all technologies harness and exploit some effect or phenomenon, usually several.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“All devices in fact process something. That, after all, is why economists refer to technologies as means of production.

Does the correspondence work in the other direction? Can we view methods and processes as devices? The answer is yes. Processes and methods-think of oil refining or sorting algorithms-are sequences of operations. But to execute, they always require some hardware, some sort of physical equipment that carries out the operations. We could see this physical equipment as forming a "device" executing this sequence of operations.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“The design process in engineering is not different in principle from that in architecture, or fashion, or music for that matter. It is a form of composition, of expression, and as such it is open to all the creativity we associate with these.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Phenomena are simply natural effects, and as such they exist independently of humans and of technology. They have no “use” attached to them. A principle by contrast is the idea of use of a phenomenon for some purpose and it exists very much in the world of humans and of use.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Conceptually at least, biology is becoming technology. And physically, technology is becoming biology. The two are starting to close on each other, and indeed as we move deeper into genomics and nanotechnology, more than this, they are starting to intermingle.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“The insight comes as a removal of blockage, often stumbled upon, either as an overall principle with a workable combination of subprinciples, or as a subprinciple that clears the way for the main principle to be used. It comes as a moment of connection, always a connection, because it connects a problem with a principle that can handle it. Strangely, for people who report such breakthroughs, the insight arrives whole, as if the subconscious had already put the parts together. And it arrives with a "knowing" that the solution is right-a feeling of appropriateness, its elegance, its extraordinary simplicity. The insight comes to an individual person, not to a team, for it wells always from an individual subconscious. And it arrives not in the midst of activities or in frenzied thought, but in moments of stillness.

This arrival is not the end of the process, it is merely a marker along the way. The concept must still be translated into a working prototype of a technology before the process is finished. Just as a composer has in mind a main theme but must orchestrate the parts that will express it, so must the originator orchestrate the working parts that will express the main concept.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“There is an analogy to this in the way you express a thought. Modern psychology and philosophy both tell us that the initial part of thinking does not take place in words. We pull up our ideas-the thought-from some unconscious level, then find a combination of words and phrases to express them. The thought exists, and its expression in words follows.

You can see this, or I should say feel this, if you speak more than one language. Suppose your company is doing business in Moscow and some of the people around the table with you speak only Russian, some only English. You have something to say and you express that thought in Russian; a moment later you express the same thought in English. The "thought" exists somehow independent of how you put it in words. You have an intention of saying something, and find words by some subconscious process to express it. The result is utterance. It can be short and spontaneous, as in a conversation; or lengthy, put together piece by piece, as with a speech you are preparing. Either way it is a combination of ideas and concepts linked together for some purpose, expressed in sentences and phrases, and ultimately in words. You are not mindful of creating a combination, but you have done that nonetheless.

It is the same with technology. The designer intends something, picks a toolbox or language for expression, envisions the concepts and functionalities needed to carry it out in his or her "mind's eye," then finds a suitable combination of components to achieve it. The envisioning can happen at one time more or less spontaneously. Or it can be drawn out, and put together in parts with much revision. We will look at how such creation works in more detail in the next chapter. But for now, notice that as with language, intention comes first and the means to fulfill it- the appropriate combination of components-fall in behind it. Design is expression.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Good design in fact is like good poetry. Not in any sense of sublimity, but in the sheer rightness of choice from the many possible for each part. Each part must fit tightly, must work accurately, must conform to the interaction of the rest. The beauty in good design is that of appropriateness, of least effort for what is achieved. It derives from a feeling that all that is in place is properly in place, that not a piece can be rearranged, that nothing is to excess. Beauty in technology does not quite require originality. In technology both form and phrases are heavily borrowed from other utterances, so in this sense we could say that, ironically, design works by combining and manipulating cliches. Still, a beautiful design always contains some unexpected combination that shocks us with its appropriateness.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“A Mahler symphony is normally just an aesthetic experience, and a software company is normally just an organization. But we should remember that these too are "technologies" if we choose to see them this way. Mahler is very deliberately "programming" phenomena in our brains. To be specific he is arranging to set up responses in our cochlear nuclei, brain stems, cerebellums, and auditory cortices. At least in this sense Mahler is an engineer.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“All these phenomena-scores of them-are captured, encapsulated in a myriad of devices, and replicated, some many thousands of times in as many thousands of identical components. That all these phenomena are caught and captured and schooled and put to work in parallel at exactly the right temperature and pressure and airflow conditions; that all these execute in concert with exactly the right timing; that all these persist despite extremes of vibration and heat and stress; that all these perform together to produce tens of thousands of pounds of thrust is not to be taken for granted. It is a wonder.

Seen this way, a technology in operation-in this case a jet engine-ceases to be a mere object at work. It becomes a metabolism. This is not a familiar way to look at any technology. But what I mean is that the technology becomes a complex of interactive processes-a complex of captured phenomena-supporting each other, using each other, "conversing" with each other, "calling" each other much as subroutines in computer programs call each other. The "calling" here need not be triggered in some sequence as in computing. It is ongoing and continuously interactive. Some assemblies are on, some are off; some operate continuously. Some operate in sequence; some operate in parallel. Some are brought in only in abnormal conditions.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“As a family of phenomena is mined into, effects uncovered earlier begin to create methods and understandings that help uncover later effects. One effect leads to another, then to another, until eventually a whole vein of related phenomena has been mined into. A family of effects forms a set of chambers connected by seams and passageways, one leading to another. And that is not all. The chambers in one place-one family of effects-lead through passageways to chambers elsewhere-to different families. Quantum phenomena could not have been uncovered without the prior uncovering of the electrical phenomena. Phenomena form a connected system of excavated chambers and passageways. The whole system underground is connected.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“A technology is an orchestration of phenomena to our use.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“So let us first look at why some technologies do not feel like standard technologies. Money is a means to the purpose of exchange, and therefore qualifies as a technology. (I am talking here about the monetary system, not the coins and paper notes that we carry.) Its principle is that any category of scarce objects can serve as a medium for exchange: gold, government-issued paper, or when these fail, cigarettes and nylons. The monetary system makes use of the "phenomenon" that we trust a medium has value as long as we believe that others trust i has value and we believe this trust will continue in the future. Notice the phenomenon here is a behavioral, not a physical one. This explains why money fulfills the requirements of a technology but does not feel like a technology. It is not based on a physical phenomenon. The same can be said for the other nontechnology-like technologies listed above. If we examine them we find they too are based upon behaioral or organizational "effects," not on physical ones.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Assigning invention in cases like this is difficult, and modern writings on technology recognize this. Says computing pioneer Michael Williams:

There is no such thing as "first" in any activity associated with human invention. If you add enough adjectives to a description you can always claim your own favorite. For example the ENIAC is often claimed to be the "first electronic, general purpose, large scale, digital computer" and you certainly have to add all those adjectives before you have a correct statement. If you leave any of them off, then machines such as the ABC, the Colossus, Zuse's Z3, and many others (some not even constructed such as Babbage's Analytical Engine) become candidates for being "first.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Design is expression.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Part of what we’ve seen in our economics is that elites previously used to appeal to gods, to how our ancestors did it, to the natural order, etc., to make credible their stories that justify their power and privilege. Well, over the last several decades, they found a new source of authority: economics. Economics has been used to justify a lot of very self-serving behavior. Economics has also been used to justify a lot of behavior that we now know is very damaging to the planet. Where social media comes into the picture is it is an incredible mechanism for accelerating the spread of stories, making them go viral. But we know from psychology and cognitive science that the stories that most excite our brains are not the most true or useful; rather, they are the ones that trigger emotions like moral outrage or tribal affinity. By splintering our notion of reality and distorting our stories, social media is doing far more damage to society than just the near-term political stuff. It is really an unwinding of the Enlightenment.”
― W. Brian Arthur, Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

“The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose. For some technologies—oil refining—the purpose is explicit.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“A new device or method is put together from the available components—the available vocabulary—of a domain. In this sense a domain forms a language; and a new technological artifact constructed from components of the domain is an utterance in the domain’s language. This makes technology as a whole a collection of several languages, because each new artifact may draw from several domains.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Viewed this way, a technology is more than a mere means. It is a programming of phenomena for a purpose. A technology is an orchestration of phenomena to our use.

There is a consequence to this. I said in Chapter 1 that technology has no neat genetics. This is true, but that does not mean that technology possesses nothing quite like genes. Phenomena, I propose, are the "genes" of technology. The parallel is not exact of course, but still, I find it helpful to think this way. We know that biology creates its structures-proteins, cells, hormones, and the like-by activating genes. In the human case there are about 21,000 of these, and the number does not vary all that much between fruit flies and humans, or humans and elephants. Individual genes do not correspond to particular structures; there is no single gene that creates the eye or even eye color. Instead, modern biology understands that genes collectively act as the elements of a programming language for the creation of a huge variety of shapes and forms. They operate much as the fixed set of musical tones and rhythms and phrases act as programming language for the creation of very different musical structures. Organisms create themselves in many different shapes and species by using much the same set of genes "programmed" to activate in different sequences.

It is the same with technology. It creates its structures-individual technologies-by "programming" a fixed set of phenomena in many different ways. New phenomena-new technological "genes"-of course add to this fixed set as time progresses. And phenomena are not combined directly; first they are captured and expressed as technological elements which are then combined. There are probably fewer phenomena than biological genes in use, but still, the analogy applies. Biology programs genes into myriad structures, and technology programs phenomena to myriad uses.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“In technology, as in writing or speech-or haute cuisine-there are varying degrees of fluency, of articulateness, of self-expression. A beginning practitioner in architecture, like a beginner at a foreign language, will use the same base combinations-the same phrases-over and over, even if not quite appropriate. A practiced architect, steeped in the art of the domain, will have discarded any notion of the grammar as pure rules, and will use instead an intuitive knowledge of what fits together. And a true master will push the envelope, will write poetry in the domain, will leave his or her "signature" in the habit-combinations used.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Phenomena are the indispensable source from which all technologies arise. All technologies, no matter how simple or sophisticated, are dressed-up versions of the use of some effect- or more usually, of several effects.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Four effects in this case: that star-wobble is caused by the presence of a planet; that a star's light can be split into spectral lines; that these spectral lines shift if the star moves (wobbles) relative to us; and that light passed through a gas produces fixed absorption lines (that can act as a benchmark for any shift in a star's light spectrum). Captured and organized properly into a working technology, these effects have found 150 new exoplanets.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Archaeologists who want to establish the date of a particular site have a number of techniques they can use. If they find organic material, say the bones of an animal, they can use radiocarbon dating. If they find the remains of wooden structures, a post or lintel say, they can use dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating. If they find a firepit they can use archaeomagnetic dating.

Radiocarbon dating works because, when alive, an organism takes in carbon from the air or through the food chain; carbon contains small amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14, which decays into nonradioactive standard carbon at a constant rate; when the organism dies it ceases to ingest carbon, so the proportion of carbon-14 in its remains steadily decays. Measuring the relative amount of carbon-14 content therefore establishes a fairly accurate date for the specimen.

Dendrochronology works because tree rings vary in width season by season according to the rainfall received, and so trees that grow in a given climatic region and historical period show similar ring-width patterns. Comparing the ring pattern to a known and dated local ring pattern establishes exactly the years in which the wood in the structure was growing.

Archaeomagnetic dating works because the earth's magnetic field changes direction over time gradually in a known way. Clays or other materials in a firepit, when fired and cooled, retain a weak magnetism that aligns with the earth's field, and this establishes a rough date for the firepit's last use.

There are still other techniques: potassium-argon dating, thermoluminescence dating, hydration dating, fission-track dating. But what I want the reader to notice is that each of these relies on some particular set of natural effects.

That a technology relies on some effect is general. A technology is always based on some phenomenon or truism of nature that can be exploited and used to a purpose. I say "always" for the simple reason that a technology that exploited nothing could achieve nothing. This is the third of the three principles I am putting forward, and it is just as important to my argument as the other two, combination and recursiveness. This principle says that if you examine any technology you find always at its center some effect that it uses. Oil refining is based on the phenomenon that different components or fractions of vaporized crude oil condense at different temperatures. A lowly hammer depends on the phenomenon of transmission of momentum (in this case from a moving object-the hammer-to a stationary one-the nail).

Often the effect is obvious. But sometimes it is hard to see, particularly when we are very familiar with the technology. What phenomenon does a truck use? A truck does not seem to be based on any particular law of nature. Nevertheless it does use a phenomenon-or, I should say, two. A truck is in essence a platform that is self-powered and can be moved easily. Central to its self-powering is the phenomenon that certain chemical substances (diesel fuel, say) yield energy when burned; and central to its ease of motion is the "phenomenon" that objects that roll do so with extremely low friction compared with ones that slide (which is used of course in the wheels and bearings). This last "phenomenon" is hardly a law of nature; it is merely a usable-and humble-natural effect. Still it is a powerful one and is exploited everywhere wheels or rolling parts are used.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“So far this does not tell us anything very general about structure except that it is hierarchical. But we can say more. Each assembly or subassembly or part has a task to perform. If it did not it would not be there. Each therefore is a means to a purpose. Each therefore, by my earlier definition, is a technology. This means that the assemblies, subassemblies, and individual parts are all executables-are all technologies. It follows that a technology consists of building blocks that are technologies, which consist of further building blocks that are technologies, which consist of yet further building blocks that are technologies, with the pattern repeating all the way down to the fundamental level of elemental components. Technologies, in other words, have a recursive structure. They consist of technologies within technologies all the way down to the elemental parts.

Recursiveness will be the second principle we will be working with. It is not a very familiar concept outside mathematics, physics, and computer science, where it means that structures consist of components that are in some way similar to themselves. In our context of course it does not mean that a jet engine consists of systems and parts that are little jet engines. That would be absurd. It means simply that a jet engine (or more generally, any technology) consists of component building blocks that are also technologies, and these consist of sub-parts that are also technologies, in a repeating (or recurring) pattern.

Technologies, then, are built from a hierarchy of technologies, and this has implications for how we should think of them, as wee will see shortly. It also means that whatever we can say in general about technologies-singular must hold also for assemblies or subsystems at lower levels as well. In particular, because a technology consists of main assembly and supporting assemblies, each assembly or subsystem must be organized this way too.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“We can make all this a good deal more comfortable by adopting a simple strategem. We can recognize that all along in the book we have really been talking about a class of systems: a class I will call purposed systems. This is the class of all means to purposes, whether physically or non-physically based. Some means-radar, the laser, MRI-we can prefer to think of as technologies in the traditional sense. Others-symphonies and organizations-we can prefer to think of as purposed systems, more like first cousins to technology, even if formally they qualify as technologies. That way we can talk about narrower physical technologies for most of our discussion, but we can also extend to the non-physical purposed-system ones when we want.

All this seems to be a digression. But it does establish the scope of what we are talking about. We can admit musical structures, money, legal codes, institutions, and organizations-indeed all means or purposed systems- to the argument even if they do not depend upon physical effects. With suitable changes, the logic I am laying out also applies to them.”
― W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

“Indeed, I once did a little exercise: I took about half a dozen economics books, the big fat ones like Samuelson’s, and so on, and looked up in the index: do the words “energy,” “entropy,” or “thermodynamics” ever occur? Not once in any of them. Energy! You can’t even have a f——king dream at night without energy.

[Quoting physicist Geoffrey West.]”
― W. Brian Arthur, Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium