The Nature of Technology

What It Is and How It Evolves

By: W. Brian Arthur

Narrated by: Victor Bevine

Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

"More than any thing else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being," says W. Brian Arthur. Yet until now, the major questions of technology have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from -- how exactly does invention work? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Why are certain regions -- Cambridge, England, in the 1920s and Silicon Valley today -- hotbeds of innovation, while others languish? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? How do new industries, and the economy itself, emerge from technologies? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur sets forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology that gives answers to these questions.

The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology's origins and evolution. It achieves for the progress of technology what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress. Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works.

Conventional thinking ascribes the invention of technologies to "thinking outside the box", or vaguely to genius or creativity, but Arthur shows that such explanations are inadequate. Rather, technologies are put together from pieces - themselves technologies - that already exist. Technologies therefore share common ancestries and combine, morph, and combine again to create further technologies. Technology evolves much as a coral reef builds itself from activities of small organisms -- it creates itself from itself; all technologies are descended from earlier technologies.

Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, and writing in wonderfully engaging and clear prose, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives.

©2009 W. Brian Arthur (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Arthur's arguments will likely alter the reader's way of thinking about technology and its relationship to humanity." (Publishers Weekly)
"We launched Java based on Brian Arthur's ideas." (Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google)

Thought-provoking

I found this book truly thought-provoking. While the style of writing could potentially feel a bit pedantic to some, the author's way of breaking down and then reconstructing technology is wonderfully logical and comprehensive. His examples resonate and illuminate his thesis quite well. I found myself applying the concepts to countless additional technological developments and feeling that this book helped me interpret them quite effectively. I especially liked the thoughtful way he connected technology to economic development, which I find few other writers have done in a way that helps further understanding of either technology or the economy.

The narration was notable for being not very notable.

What’s the point

3 chapters in amd still seems like the prologue.
Needs to have some meat on the bone.

mind blowing

perfect reader and great content. one of the seminal books of the new century. Amazing

Love Brian Arthur & thesis but theory not perfect

I'm a huge Brian Arthur fan. His early work on Increasing Returns to Scale and Path Dependence -- initially rejected by virtually every reputable economics journal -- was brilliant. As one of the founding members of Santa Fe Institute studying complexity science -- the most important area of scientific study today -- Arthur is an extremely important figure in the paradigm shift in economics currently (albeit slowly) under way.

The Nature of Technology (TNOT) was a fascinating read that deftly explains how new technologies come to be. While there's no great aha-moment that opens up some new novel way of thinking about technology, it does adequately explain how technological developments emerge.

Through a very narrow lens you can call it evolutionary, perhaps the same way a chef mixing two heretofore uncombined ingredients that create a delicious new dish is evolutionary. But in the broader Darwinian sense, what's posited in TNOT is not evolutionary. Genetic mutations that Darwin wrote about were needed for the species to survive. The same theory was further explained by Richards Dawkins' spectacular The Selfish Gene.

The modern day technological developments described in TNOT did not arise out of necessity so much as out of convenience (and logic) -- that is, combining multiple existing technologies to create something novel and new.

The five stars were for how thorough his analysis was. I still think it's worth the credit.

Pretty good- not as good as it was hyped

I would still recommend this book to anybody interested in science, technology, business or similar related fields. Some ideas are great. But I found lots of rambling and long-winded paragraphs making it not that interesting.

And also, most of the arguments represent author’s passion or meditation more than the fruit of his long career as a distinguished researcher.

Not very interesting

It was BORING!