BOOKS ON SCIENCE
Rethinking What Leads the Way: Science, or New Technology?
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: October 19, 2009
Consider what the state of science would be without the microscope, the telescope, or a more recent technical advance like automated DNA sequencing.
There would still be science, rooted in human perception and reason. But it would be far less potent than modern science, which has technologically expanded the senses, and with computers, the intellect, to explore and decipher reality, from the universe itself to the most elusive subatomic particle. Higgs bosons, anyone?
The popular view is that technology is the handmaiden of science — less pure, more commercial. But in “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves,” W. Brian Arthur, an economist, reframes the relationship between science and technology as part of an effort to come up with a comprehensive theory of innovation. In Dr. Arthur’s view, the relationship between science and technology is more symbiotic than is generally conceded. Science and technology move forward together in a kind of co-evolution. And science does not lead.
“What I began to realize as I got into the project is that everything emerges out of technology,” Dr. Arthur said in a recent interview. “It’s technology that gives rise to both modern science and the economy, and we tend to think of it in reverse — that science gives rise to technology and the economy gives rise to technology. But technology is more fundamental than either one.”
It is easy to see how someone who has become one of Silicon Valley’s leading thinkers would take that view, but Dr. Arthur’s argument as laid out in “The Nature of Technology” is not a one-sided manifesto.
In trying to explain innovation, he steps away from both Darwinian and more mechanistic approaches to how technologies change and tries to build a theoretical framework around what he describes as a “combinatorial” model of technological evolution.
Technologies evolve, Dr. Arthur writes, based on the chaotic and constant recombining of already existing technologies. In this view all technological breakthroughs emerge as novel combinations of existing technological components, which have themselves come into existence through the same process. And, he argues, both technological and scientific progress are driven by humans looking for a means to an end they have already defined.
It is a profoundly social view of innovation. In Dr. Arthur’s view, the “lone inventor” is in fact an invention, part of American economic mythology. The apparently independent genius is always someone who has a deep knowledge of existing technologies and has the inspiration to combine them in new ways.
“The Nature of Technology” is evocative of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn. Dr. Kuhn explored the idea of “paradigm shifts” to explain scientific progress. Scientific theories would gradually accumulate anomalies as new evidence was developed, until a crisis led to a new paradigm or theoretical model. In Dr. Arthur’s view of technological change, the market plays the role of arbiter in the emergence of new technologies.
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