EP138 W. Brian Arthur on the Nature of Technology

W. Brian Arthur & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about his book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves... W. Brian Arthur & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about his book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. They talk about the surprisingly little work on the nature of technology, invention vs innovation, understanding technology as harnessed phenomena, human purpose, the fluid relationship between economies & tech, technology as building on existing components, multi=level evolutionary dynamics in tech, theory of invention & problem solving, domains of technology, relationship between tech & science, tech density & modularity, geographic clusters of tech, knowledge vs deep craft, and more. Episode Transcript The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves W. Brian Arthur is an economist and complexity thinker. He is best known for his work on network effects locking markets in to the domination of a single player. He is also one of the pioneers of the science of complexity—the science of how patterns and structures self-organize. He is a member of the Founders Society of the Santa Fe Institute and in 1988 ran its first research program. He has served on SFI's Science Board for 18 years and its Board of Trustees for 10 years, and is currently External Professor at SFI. He held the Morrison Chair of Economics and Population Studies at Stanford from 1983 to 1996. He has degrees in operations research, economics, mathematics, and electrical engineering.