‘The Nature of Technology – What it is and how it evolves’ by W. Brian Arthur (Allen Lane)

By Richard BRONK
Visiting Fellow, LSE

Brian Arthur is well known in the economics and business world for his work on increasing returns in high-technology markets and as one of the pioneers of Complexity Theory and its application to economics. The arrival of his new book, The Nature of Technology, was therefore always likely to cause a stir. But for me, as author of The Romantic Economist, it had special promise: for here was a work dedicated to understanding the dynamic and self-creating properties of technologies and the economies that use them.

For Arthur, a technology is organised around a principle of how to exploit natural (or social) phenomena for some particular purpose. All technologies are made up of component sub-technologies and, crucially, can in turn act as building blocks for other technologies. Armed with these abstract premises, Arthur develops a ‘combinatorial’ theory of technological evolution. Since all novel technologies are combinations of existing technologies (or combinations of pre-formed modules of multiple technologies), the potential for new technologies grows exponentially with the number of extant technologies. At the same time, the need for new technologies grows rapidly, not least to support other emerging technologies and offset the problems they create. In this sense, technology as a set is self-creating or ‘autopoietic’.

There are many particular insights in this fascinating book. For example, technology’s relationship with science is shown to be fully symbiotic, with technology (the telescope, for example) as important to the evolution of science as science is to the development of technologies. Likewise, technological innovation is not something that happens to an economy and to which it must adjust; rather both economy and technology develop in a continual process of mutual reconfiguration. For Arthur, the economy is ‘an expression of its technologies’: it mediates the creation of new technologies, and these in turn continually alter the structure of the economy. This echoes and develops Schumpeter’s insights about the process of creative destruction incessantly changing the economy ‘from within’. Arthur also combines his understanding of increasing returns with subtle epistemological arguments to account for technology ‘lock-in’ and the clustering of new technology providers.

With my Romantic Economist hat on, there are several other facets of Arthur’s book worthy of applause. First, Arthur returns to the tradition of Marshall and other early economists by writing in what Wordsworth called a ‘language really used by men’, thereby making his arguments and assumptions accessible (and open to scrutiny) by specialists and non-specialists alike. Accessible but not always easy: the book operates at a level of abstraction and with a frequency of precise redefinition of terms that some will find off-putting even if perhaps necessary in a book aiming at the complete reconceptualisation of its subject. The abstraction is, though, relieved by numerous beautifully explained examples of real technologies that serve to bring the text alive. Arthur’s main intended audience may be theorists and academics, but the text is also peppered with general practical pointers for how to manage technology businesses. The reader is left in no doubt that steady-state optimisation and rational analysis of defined problems is not enough in the world of self-creating technology. Instead managers must continually adapt, innovate and experiment with ways to make sense of their dynamic and unpredictable environment.

I also applaud Arthur’s paradoxical but convincing insistence on applying the sort of organic and biological metaphors preferred by the Romantics to the machine world of technology. ‘Technology is becoming biology’: as a collective it ‘builds itself organically from itself’, with cascades of novelty only partially offset by mass extinction events (as obsolete technologies are superseded). The representative individual modern technology is ‘a fluid thing, dynamic, alive, highly configurable’. Moreover, the jet engine, for example, is a ‘metabolism’, a set of interacting parts that senses and reacts to its environment. Such use of metaphor helps shake us out of our mechanistic way of looking at technology, to reveal aspects that are usually ignored.

But Arthur is not a thoroughgoing Romantic. For one thing, while interested in the constitutive role of language in how we think, he abstains from any serious consideration of the supportive role of different national or regional institutions for different types of technology specialisation. For another, he is determined not to sprinkle the stardust of imagination over the serious world of technology. While admitting that good design is ‘like good poetry’, and that a technology domain is a ‘realm in the imagination’, he is concerned to demystify the process of innovation as much as possible: ‘the fact that all inventions are supported by a pyramid of causality means that an invention tends to show up when the pieces necessary for it, and the need for it, fall into place’. There is nothing pre-ordained or precisely predictable about Arthur’s self-creating technology, but his epistemological position is revealed by the fact that when talking about invention he uses the language of discovery and finding solutions rather than creating them. This implies that, by the time the invention is made, the solution is already ‘out there’ waiting to be noticed. For reasons I will explain, I believe this to be misleading.

It is certainly true that much of Arthur’s demystification of innovation is highly desirable and warranted. Rather than being an isolated moment of intuition, innovation is usually the product of experience, careful articulation of problems and the organised exercise of reasoning imagination in looking for new connections between inherited building blocks of thought and technique. But equally I would argue that Arthur underestimates the degree of creativity and imagination (as opposed to rational deduction and analysis) that innovation requires at the micro-level of individual inventors. Very often, the number of possible permutations of existing conceivably pertinent technologies is so vast that inventors must create, as much as find, a feasible path to a new solution. In addition, the required imaginative receptiveness to new ideas, new connections and new ways of looking at problems (roughly equating to Keat’s ‘negative capability’) – the willingness not to rush to impose an established template of understanding – is perhaps more unusual in the real world than Arthur implies. Even more rare is the imaginative ability to build a consistent vision of how things might be, without being blinded by the scale of different possibilities. For these reasons, I would also argue that Arthur overstates how much new technologies have an ancestry; and he understates the degree to which, as George Shackle put it, ‘novelties of the imagination’ inject ‘in some respect ex nihilo, the unforeknowable arrangement of elements’, thereby ‘cutting into the fabric of governance of time-to-come by time past’ (‘Imagination and the Nature of Choice’, Edinburgh University Press, 1979).

I have one related quibble about the book as a whole. Much of its freshness undoubtedly comes from the fact that Arthur develops a largely original framework for thinking about technology that is not cluttered by references to too many other works. But this comes at the cost of Arthur sometimes having to reinvent conceptual wheels. It is also a pity because Arthur is at his best when he does engage with other thinkers. For example, he makes excellent use of Kuhn’s theory of paradigms to suggest by analogy how the cycle of technology develops, and he explores to great effect the resonances and dissonances of the metaphor of Darwinian evolution applied to technology. Furthermore, there is an irony in Arthur not engaging more with his predecessors: for, in his view, innovation is always a function of new combinations of existing theories; and yet his innovative book reminded me at times of Wordsworth’s immortal line on Newton, ‘Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone’.