Danny Hillis famously said technology is everything that doesn’t work yet.
Technology is, by definition, the intellectual frontier. It’s taking things from science and culture that we have not figured out how to mass produce or create efficiently and figuring out how to commercialise it and make it available to everybody.
Technology’s larger impact will be in complementing and augmenting human capabilities, not replacing them.
From The Nature of Technology - What It Is and How It Evolves:
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Technology is a means to fulfil a human purpose:method or process or device. It executes a purpose. It supplies a functionality. It does something
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Methods and processes both transform something by a series of stages or steps. All devices in fact process something.
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A technology embodies a sequence of operations; we can call this its “software.” And these operations require physical equipment to execute them; we can call this the technology’s “hardware.” If we emphasise the “software” we see a process or method. If we emphasise the “hardware,” we see a physical device.
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Devices and processes are two categories, merely different ways of viewing a technology”
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Technology as an assemblage of practices and components
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This is technology as the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture
Recursiveness and its consequences:
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Technologies, in other words, have a recursive structure. They consist of technologies within technologies all the way down to the elemental parts.
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In the real world, technologies are highly reconfigurable; they are fluid things, never static, never finished, never perfect.
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“And what gives a particular technology its power? Certainly it cannot quite be its principle; that after all, is only an idea. It must be something else.”
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Had our species been born into a universe with different phenomena we would have developed different technologies. And had we uncovered phenomena over historical times in a different sequence, we would have developed different technologies.
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Science and technology co-evolve in a symbiotic relationship