The Nature of Technology Kap 9 Flashcards
The Mechanisms of Evolution (10 cards)
What does Arthur mean by the “collective of technology,” and why does he describe it as autopoietic?
The collective of technology is the vast set of all processes, devices, components, methods, and organizational forms that have ever existed. Arthur calls it autopoietic—self‑creating—because every new technology is constructed from parts and principles that already reside in this collective, and in turn it offers itself as a building block for further inventions. Thus the system bootstraps itself without needing elements from outside technology’s own history.
Why must every novel technology be grounded in existing technologies? Give one historical example Arthur uses.
A new solution can only be realized with components and techniques that already exist in the physical world; without them it could not be built, manufactured, or operated. Arthur illustrates this with the triode vacuum tube: once available, it was recombined with coils, capacitors, and resistors to yield amplifiers, oscillators, and ultimately the foundations of radio broadcasting and early computers.
How does combination act as the main “supply‑side” force in technological evolution, and why does Arthur claim its possibilities explode exponentially?
Combination supplies novelty because any subset of existing elements can, in principle, be assembled into a new device or method. With N basic elements, the crude upper bound on unique, non‑singleton combinations is 2ᴺ−N−1; as N grows, this number rises exponentially (e.g., more than a trillion possibilities once N ≈40). Even if only a tiny fraction are workable, the pool of potential inventions still grows astronomically.
What are opportunity niches, and what two broad sources create them?
Opportunity niches are unmet purposes that a technology could profitably fulfill. They arise (1) from human and social needs that differentiate and multiply as societies prosper and (2) from needs generated by technologies themselves—supporting tools, cheaper substitutes, or solutions to problems the technologies cause (e.g., roads, refineries, and repair shops created by the automobile).
List Arthur’s six generic events that occur when a new technology enters the active collection.
(1) It joins the active set as a new node.
(2) It can replace components in existing systems.
(3) It creates ancillary needs for supporting technologies and organizations.
(4) As displaced technologies fade, their own niches (and dependents) disappear.
(5) The newcomer itself becomes a potential component for future combinations.
(6) The economy adjusts prices, costs, and incentives in response to these changes.
What does Arthur mean by “avalanches of destruction”, and how do they propagate through the technological network?
When a superior technology replaces an older one, all ancillary technologies that existed only to serve the obsolete system lose their niches and collapse in turn—much like dominoes. The automobile’s replacement of horse transport, which wiped out blacksmithing, carriage making, and even anvil production, exemplifies these cascading
Summarize the design and key outcome of the Polak & Arthur computer experiment with logic circuits.
Starting with only a primitive NAND gate, the program randomly wired existing circuits together; any combination that satisfied one of many preset logical “needs” became a new building block. After roughly 250,000 iterations the system had, unaided, evolved complex functions such as an 8‑bit adder—an outcome astronomically unlikely by blind search alone—demonstrating how stepping‑stone inventions enable combinatorial evolution.
Why are stepping‑stone technologies crucial in the evolutionary process observed in the experiment (and in real history)?
Complex inventions can appear only after simpler intermediate functions exist and find uses; those intermediates both supply necessary components and create new niches. Removing the intermediate “needs” in the simulation prevented higher‑level circuits from ever emerging—mirroring how, for example, radar likely required radio technology to precede it in actual technological history.
According to Arthur, how does technological evolution differ fundamentally from biological evolution, even though both show combination?
In biology, novel combined structures must traverse a slow Darwinian path—incremental genetic changes that must yield viable organisms at each step—so large‑scale combination events are rare. In technology, by contrast, explicit human design lets components from disparate “species” be recombined directly and routinely; combinatorial evolution is the norm, with variation and selection playing a secondary, filtering role.
On what grounds does Arthur tentatively argue that the collective of technology can be considered “alive”?
Judged by common systems‑biology criteria, technology is self‑organizing (follows simple combinatorial rules), autopoietic (produces itself), reproduces and grows (elements die and are replaced), adapts to its environment (through market selection), and exchanges energy with that environment. Like a coral reef, it is a living webwork—though it still depends on human agency for its ongoing metabolism.
