Brian Arthur: Technology and Human Purpose

I've spent some time with Brian Arthur's papers on complexity in economics but haven't yet looked at his recent book The Nature of Technology. The notion that Arthur's theory of technological evolution "downplays human creativity," asserted by John Agar in Nature, inspired me to look / listen further.

Here are some notes from two excellent audio interviews, one by Moira Gunn at Tech Nation (mp3) and the second by J. Hughes at IEET's Changesurfer Radio (mp3).

Tech Nation:

My definition of technology is any means to a human purpose. ...

It occurred to me that invention and science were not much different. What constitutes a theory in science is actually a combination or concatenation of parts that we already accept. ...

What Darwin was really doing was putting together a story. It’s almost like putting together the plot of a novel. … His key insight, in 1838, was all about variation and selection of the fitter individuals. If you look at that story – it’s told in three paragraphs in the first chapter of his book – it’s like a little technology. I’m contending that science works the same way. ... Theories are basically stories. … At bottom [scientific] explanations are constructed things, just like technologies are.
 

Changesurfer Radio:

There is lots of Darwinian mechanism around. Once you get the jet engine, you get lots of different variations of it. … because we have different purposes, and different designers and different environments to work in – and once variations are out there, the better ones are selected.

But what I want to emphasize in my book is that radically new technologies – what we call inventions – don’t come about by Darwinian process. Darwin didn’t talk about combinations. That wasn’t known about at all in his day.

If I’m thinking: ‘How did the computer come about?’ It wasn’t through variations on electro-mechanical calculators. Nor did the jet engine come about by varying air piston engines. … These came about by trying to solve some problems. … Somebody says I think I can solve this problem by combining things together in a new way. And that’s the really important mechanism in technology, not so much Darwin’s variation and selection. ...

I’m not saying that technology is going to be autonomous, and that we are going to be servants of technology any more than we are now. … As human beings we have co-evolved with our technologies. … What I don’t want us to see is stupidly concocting technologies just because we can do it. And I think we need to be quite careful and circumspect about what we bring in as new technologies. And as human beings, we should realize that technology is there to serve us. We’re not here to serve technology.