The Nature of Technology
Published in
1 min readNov 18, 2016
“The whole of a technology and all of its parts develop simultaneously in parallel…. All this activity is going on at many points in the network at the same time. Like the buildout of species in the biosphere, it is a parallel process, and there is nothing orderly about it…. A novel combination of considerable consequence can appear — the steam engine, say — and a burst of change is unleashed. New niches form, new combinations appear, and much rearranging occurs. Change begets spates of change, and between these, quiescence begets quiescence.”
— Brian Arthur, “The Nature of Technology,” p143, p180, p187
