W. Brian Arthur

The Nature of Technology

What it is and How it Evolves

Neat, eh?

Dr. Arthur is not your regular engineer, technologist, or business advisor; he is a thinker.

I am not going to go into details about his insights, which are several. What I write here are mine, as inspired by him so far in my reading.

He states:

Technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose.


Technology is an assemblage of practices and components.


Technology is the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture.

Economy is the set of arrangements and activities by which a society satisfies its needs.

I just read today in the NYT that the next generation of wannabe Wiis will  use your hands, not some engineered new remote. Your hands will turn into remotes. Neat, eh?

Well, I am the Chief Scientist of a little Elgin Illinois research company, and we had that idea more than three years ago. I am afraid we didn't patent.

The big guys come in now with all their money and dollars, I feel they are going to beat us to a pulp.

What does it take to go from a simple insight into money?

If I knew I wouldn't be posting these things for free.

I take from Arthur's book that you have to be inside of where things are happening, like Tesla joining Edison for some time, or Feynman and his buddies getting one dollar for any idea on how to use nuclear energy. There is a fierce fight out there. You have to be a tiger, willing to cheat and steal like Bill Gates, with that OS he paid a few bucks for, to some nobody, that remained a nobody.

Enough complaining.

One way to get your hand to control a video game is to immerse yourself in some low frequency electromagnetic field, sensitive to your capacitance, or inductance. Just plain old James Clerk Maxwell, and hide it all in some legalese that nobody will ever understand, and voilà, you have a patent.

So it goes.