W. Brian Arthur
All technologies are combinations of earlier technologies plus newly captured natural phenomena; the space of possible technologies expands as existing technologies combine, just as an ecosystem expands as new species become possible.
Key work
The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (2009)
W. Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology is a systematic attempt to answer the question that most economists and engineers take for granted: where do new technologies actually come from? His answer is combinatorial. Every technology, from the simplest stone blade to the jet engine, is a combination of simpler component technologies, each of which is itself a combination of still simpler ones, until at the base one reaches phenomena — physical and chemical effects that can be harnessed: the combustion of hydrocarbons, the piezoelectric properties of quartz, the quantum tunneling of electrons through thin barriers. A technology is, at its core, a captured phenomenon plus the assemblage of other technologies needed to make that capture reliable and useful.
The combinatorial model implies that the evolution of technology is autocatalytic: each new technology becomes a component available for further combinations, expanding what Arthur, borrowing from Stuart Kauffman, calls the 'adjacent possible' — the set of technologies that can be assembled from currently existing building blocks. This means technological evolution is not linear but exponential in its potential, and it accelerates as the combinatorial library grows. It also means that the origin of any given technology is not a single inventor's insight but the prior existence of a set of enabling technologies and a newly discovered or newly accessible phenomenon. Arthur's framework dissolves the romantic mythology of invention and replaces it with an ecology: technologies arise the way species do — not from nothing but from the recombination and extension of what already exists.
“Technology creates itself out of itself.”