Dr. Brian Arthur and I talk about how technology can be modeled as a modular and evolving system, combinatorial evolution more broadly and dig into some fascinating technological case studies that informed his book The Nature of Technology.

Brian is a researcher and author who is perhaps best known for his work on complexity economics, but I wanted to talk to him because of the fascinating work he's done building out theories of technology. As we discuss, there's been a lot of theorizing around science — with the works of Popper, Kuhn and others. But there's been less rigorous work on how technology works despite its effects on our lives.

Brian currently works at PARC (formerly Xerox PARC, the birthplace of personal computing) and has also worked at the Santa Fe institute and was a professor Stanford university before that.

Links

W. Brian Arthur's Wikipedia Page
The Nature of Technology on Amazon
W. Brian Arthur's homepage at the Santa Fe Institute

Transcript

Brian Arthur

[00:00:00 ] 

In this conversation, Dr. Brian Arthur. And I talk about how technology can be modeled as modular and evolving system. Commentorial evolution more broadly, and we dig into some fascinating technological hae studies that informed your book, his book, the nature of tech. Brian is a researcher and author who is perhaps best known for his work on complexity economics.

Uh, but I wanted to talk to him [00:01:00 ] because of the fascinating work he's done, building out theories of technology. Uh, as we discussed in the podcast, there's been a lot of theorizing around science, you know, with the works of popper and Kuhn and other. But there's has been much less rigorous work on how technology works despite its effect on our lives.

As some background, Brian currently works at park formerly Xerox park, the birthplace of the personal computer, and has also worked at the Santa Fe Institute and was a professor at Stanford university before that. Uh, so without further ado, here's my conversation with Brian Arthur.

 Mo far less interested in technology. So if anybody asks me about technology immediately search. Sure. But so the background to this is that mostly I'm known for a new framework and economic theory, which is called complexity economics. I'm not the [00:02:00 ] only developer of that, but certainly one of the fathers, well, grandfather, one of the fathers, definitely.

I was thinking one of the co-conspirators I think every new scientific theory like starts off as a little bit of a conspiracy. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. This is no exception anyways. So that's what I've been doing. I'm I've think I've produced enough papers and books on that. And I would, so I've been in South Africa lately for many months since last year got back about a month ago and I'm now I was, as these things work in life, I think there's arcs, you know, you're getting interested in something, you work it out or whatever it would be.

Businesses, you [00:03:00 ] start children, there's a kind of arc and, and thing. And you work all that out. And very often that reaches some completion. So most of the things I've been doing, we've reached a completion. I thought maybe it's because I getting ancient, but I don't think so. I think it was that I just kept working at these things.

And for some reason, technologies coming back up to think about it in 2009, when this book came out, I stopped thinking about technology people, norm they think, oh yeah, you wrote this book. You must be incredibly interested. Yeah. But it doesn't mean I want to spend the rest of your life. Just thinking about the site, start writing this story, like writing Harry Potter, you know, it doesn't mean to do that forever.

Wait, like writing the book is like the whole [00:04:00 ] point of writing the book. So you can stop thinking about it. Right? Like you get it out of your head into the book. Yeah, you're done. So, okay. So this is very much Silicon valley and I left academia in 1996. I left Stanford

I think was I'm not really an academic I'm, I'm a researcher sad that those two things have diverged a little bit. So Stanford treated me extraordinarily well. I've no objections, but anyway, I think I'd been to the Santa Fe Institute and it was hard to come back to standard academia after that.

 So why, should people care about sort of, not just the output of the technology creation process, but theory behind technology.

Why, why does that matter? Well[00:05:00 ] 

I think that what a fine in in general, whether it's in Europe or China or America, People use tremendous amount of technology. If you ask the average person, what technology is, they tell you it's their smartphone, or it's catch a tree in their cars or something, but they're, most people are contend to make heavy use of technology of, I count everything from frying pans or cars but we make directly or indirectly, enormously heavy use of technology.

And we don't think about where it comes from. And so there's a few kind of tendencies and biases, you know we watch we have incredibly good retinal displays these days on our computers. [00:06:00 ] We can do marvelous things with our smartphone. We switch on GPS and our cars, and very shortly that we won't have to drive at all presumably in a few years.

And so all of this technology is doing marvelous things, but for some strange reason, We take it for granted in the sense, we're not that curious as to how it works. People trend in engineering is I am, or I can actually tell you that throughout my entire life, I've been interested in how things work, how technology works, even if it's just something like radios.

I remember when I was 10, I like many other kids. I, I constructed a radio and a few instructions. I was very curious how all that worked and but people in general are not curious. So I [00:07:00 ] invite them quite often to do the following thought experiments. Sometimes them giving talks. All right. Technology.

Well, it's an important, yeah, sort of does it matter? Probably while I would matter. And a lot of people manage to be mildly hostile to technology, but there are some of the heaviest users they're blogging on there on Facebook and railing about technology and then getting into their tech late and cars and things like that.

So the thought experiment I like to pose to people is imagine you wake up one morning. And for some really weird or malign reason, all your technology is to super weird. So you wake up in your PJ's and you stagger off to the bathroom, but the toilet, [00:08:00 ] you trying to wash your hands or brush your teeth.

That is no sink in the bathroom. There's no running water. You scratch your head and just sort of shrugged in you go off to make coffee, but there's no coffee maker, et cetera. You, in this aspiration, you leave your house and go to clinch your car to go to work. But there's no car. In fact, there's no gas stations.

In fact, there's no cars on the roads. In fact, there's no roads and there's no buildings downtown and you're just standing there and naked fields. And wondering, where does this all go? And really what's happened in this weird Saifai set up is that let's say all technologies that were cooked up after say 1300.

So what would that be? The last 700 years or so? I've disappeared. And and you've [00:09:00 ] just left there and. People then said to me, well, I mean, wouldn't there have been technologies then. Sure. So you know how to, if you're a really good architect, you might know how to build cathedrals. You might know how to do some stone bridges.

You might know how to produce linen so that you're not walking around with any proper warm clothes and so on. But our whole, my point is that if you took away everything invented. So in the last few hundred years, our modern world or disappear, and you could say, well, we have science, Peter, but without technology, you wouldn't have any instruments to measure anything.

There'd be no telescopes. Well, we still have our conceptual ideas. Well, we would still vote Republican or not as the case may be. Yeah, you'd have, and I'd still have my family. Yeah. But how long are your kids gonna [00:10:00 ] live? Because no modern medicine. Yeah, et cetera. So my point is that not only does technology influence us, it creates our entire world.

And yet we take this thing that creates our entire world. Totally. For granted, I'd say by and large, there are plenty of people who are fascinated like you or me, but we tend to take it for granted. And so there isn't much curiosity about technology. And when I started to look into this seriously, I find that there's no ology of technology.

There's theories about where science comes from and there's theories about music musicology and theories, e