What is technology?1 In the narrowest sense, technology consists of manu-actured objects like tools (axes, arrowheads, and their modern equivalents) and containers (pots, water reservoirs, buildings). Their purpose is either to enhance human capabilities (e.g., with a hammer you can apply a stronger force to an object) or to enable humans to perform tasks they could not perform otherwise (with a pot you can transport larger amounts of water; with your hands you cannot). Engineers call such objects “hardware”. An-thropologists speak of “artifacts”.
But technology does not end there. Artifacts have to be produced. They have to be invented, designed, and manufactured. This requires a larger system including hardware (such as machinery or a manufacturing plant), factor inputs (labor, energy, raw materials, capital), and finally “software”
(know-how, human knowledge and skills). The latter, for which the French use the term technique, represents the disembodied nature of technology, its knowledge base. Thus, technology includes both what things are made and how things are made.
Finally, knowledge, or technique, is required not only for the production of artifacts, but also for their use. Knowledge is needed to drive a car or use a bank account. Knowledge is needed both at the level of the individual, in complex organizations, and at the level of society. A typewriter, without a user who knows how to type, let alone how to read, is simply a useless, heavy piece of equipment.
Technological hardware varies in size and complexity, as does the “software” required to produce and use hardware. The two are interrelated and require both tangible and intangible settings in the form of spatial structures and social organizations. Institutions, including governments, firms, and markets, and social norms and attitudes, are especially important in determining how systems for producing and using artifacts emerge and function. They determine how particular artifacts and combinations of artifacts originate, which ones are rejected or which ones become successful, and, if successful, how quickly they are incorporated in the economy and the society.
The latter step is referred to as technology diffusion.
Neither the wheeled wagon, the plow, the potter’s
wheel, nor the military chariot could of themselves have accomplished the transformations that took place in the great valleys of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, and eventually passed, in ripples and waves, to other parts of the planet”. To describe the organization of human beings jointly with artifacts in an “archetypal machine composed of human parts”, Mumford introduced the notion of a “mega-machine”, with cities as a primary example.
Some may consider such semantics as philosophical overkill and irrel-
evant for a book on technology and global change. Others might find in them confirmation of a general uneasiness that technology is something large,opaque, and pervasive, which constrains rather than enhances our choices.
Nevertheless it is important to present at the outset the broad continuum of conceptualizations of technology. It emphasizes that technology cannot be separated from the economic and social context out of which it evolves, and which is responsible for its production and its use. In turn, the social and economic context is shaped by the technologies that are produced and used. And through technology humans have acquired powerful capabil-ities to transform their natural environments locally, regionally, and, more recently, globally.
The circular nature of the feedback loops affecting technological development cannot be stressed too much. All the numerous technology studies of the 20th century share one conclusion: it is simply wrong to conceptualize technological evolution according to a simple linear model, no matter how appealing the simplification. Technological evolution is neither simple norlinear. Its four most important distinctive characteristics are instead that it is uncertain, dynamic, systemic, and cumulative.
Uncertainty is a basic fact of life, and technology is no exception. The first source of technological uncertainty derives from the fortunate fact that there always exists a variety of solutions to perform a particular task. It is always uncertain which might be “best”, taking into account technical criteria, economic criteria, and social criteria. Uncertainty prevails at all stages of technological evolution, from initial design choices, through success or failure in the marketplace, to eventual environmental impacts and spin-off effects. The technological and management literature labels such uncertainty a “snake pit” problem. It is like trying to pick a particular snake out of a pit of hundreds that all look alike. Others use the biblical quote “many are called, but few are chosen”. Technological uncertainty continues to be a notorious embarrassment in efforts to “forecast” technological change. But there is also nothing to be gained by a strategy of “waiting until the skyclears”. It will not clear, uncertainty will persist, and the correct strategy is experimentation with technological variety.
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