Those who asked first

The Thinkers

From Aristotle's technē to Kauffman's adjacent possible — fifteen attempts, across twenty-three centuries, to say what technology is and where it comes from.

Aristotle

384–322 BCE

Greek philosopher

Making (technē) is a kind of knowing that brings forth form latent in matter.

Lucretius

c. 99–55 BCE

Roman Epicurean poet and philosopher

Technology arose by humans imitating nature's accidents — learning metallurgy, for instance, from watching forest fires melt ore out of hillsides.

Francis Bacon

1561–1626

English philosopher and statesman

Knowledge is power; the deliberate project of dominion over nature through organized invention is both possible and obligatory.

Ernst Kapp

1808–1896

German philosopher of technology

Tools are 'organ projections' — externalizations of the human body; the hammer extends the fist, the lens extends the eye.

Karl Marx

1818–1883

German philosopher and political economist

Tools and social relations shape each other; the origin of any technology is never purely technical but always embedded in the relations of production that enable and constrain it.

V. Gordon Childe

1892–1957

Australian-British archaeologist and prehistorian

The Neolithic and Urban Revolutions show that surplus production and city life compound invention; technology does not arise in isolation but in the dense social and economic networks that cities make possible.

Lewis Mumford

1895–1990

American historian and philosopher of technology

The first 'megamachine' was an organization of human beings, not metal; and a life-centered polytechnics has always existed alongside — and been suppressed by — power-centered monotechnics.

José Ortega y Gasset

1883–1955

Spanish philosopher

Technology is how the human being — a creature with no fixed nature — invents itself and the life it imagines living.

Martin Heidegger

1889–1976

German phenomenological philosopher

Modern technology is a distinctive mode of revealing the world — 'Gestell' (enframing) — that reduces everything, including nature and the human, to 'standing-reserve' available for exploitation.

Marshall McLuhan

1911–1980

Canadian media theorist

Every technology and medium is an extension of a human faculty that, once adopted, reshapes the sensorium, the psyche, and the social order — independent of the content it carries.

André Leroi-Gourhan

1911–1986

French paleoanthropologist and archaeologist

Upright posture freed the hand and the face simultaneously; tool, brain, and language co-evolved in a single process Leroi-Gourhan called 'exteriorization' of memory and gesture.

Bernard Stiegler

1952–2020

French philosopher of technology

Through 'epiphylogenesis', humans evolve by inheriting knowledge stored in technical objects outside the body; the human and the technical co-originate and are constitutively inseparable.

W. Brian Arthur

1945–

American economist and complexity theorist

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.

Kevin Kelly

1952–

American technology writer and editor

The 'technium' — the self-reinforcing system of all technology — is a continuation of biological evolution with its own tendencies and trajectory, independent of any individual human intention.

Stuart Kauffman

1939–

American theoretical biologist and complexity scientist

The 'adjacent possible' — the set of next reachable states from any given configuration — expands as entities combine; each innovation opens a new set of possible innovations, so the space of what can be built grows as we build.