The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves [精装]

"More than any thing else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being," says W. Brian Arthur. Yet, until now the major questions of technology have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from -- how exactly does invention work? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Why are certain regions -- Cambridge, England, in the 1920s and Silicon Valley today -- hotbeds of innovation, while others languish? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? How do new industries, and the economy itself, emerge from technologies? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur sets forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology that gives answers to these questions.

The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology's origins and evolution. It achieves for the progress of technology what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress. Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Conventional thinking ascribes the invention of technologies to "thinking outside the box," or vaguely to genius or creativity, but Arthur shows that such explanations are inadequate. Rather, technologies are put together from pieces -- themselves technologies -- that already exist. Technologies therefore share common ancestries and combine, morph, and combine again to create further technologies. Technology evolves much as a coral reef builds itself from activities of small organisms -- it creates itself from itself; all technologies are descended from earlier technologies.

Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, and writing in wonder fully engaging and clear prose, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives.

~"Brian Arthur's brilliantly original analysis of how technology develops and evolves reminds me of Euclid's Geometry -- it's clear, simple and seemingly self-evident now that a master has spent years working it out. The Nature of Technology is a seminal work, thrilling to read and rich in implications for business as well as engineering and the social sciences." -- Richard Rhodes, Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction for The Making of the Atomic Bomb^"The Nature of Technology is the most important book on technology and the economy since Schumpeter. In clear, lucid prose and with fascinating examples, Arthur describes how technology 'creates itself' in an evolutionary process that has taken our world from stone tools to iPods. A work of deep and lasting importance that deserves to be widely read -- you will not think about technology the same way again." -- Eric D. Beinhocker, author of The Origin of Wealth^"The refreshing clarity that Brian Arthur brings to the most overwhelming force in the universe will benefit anyone trying to tame technology -- critics, eager boosters, and the perplexed alike." -- Kevin Kelly, author of New Rules for the New Economy^"Hundreds of millions of dollars slosh around Silicon Valley every day based on Brian Arthur's ideas." -- John Seeley Brown, former director of PARC^"We launched Java based on Brian Arthur's ideas." -- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google~