Explaining Technology

von Roger Koppl, Stuart A Kauffman, Robert E Ulanowicz, Wim Hordijk, James Herriot, Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, Abigail Devereaux, Sergi Valverde, Brian D Fath

86 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

A long tradition explains technological change as recombination. Within this tradition, this Element develops an innovative combinatorial model of technological change and tests it with 2,000 years of global GDP data and with data from US patents filed between 1835 and 2010. The model explains 1) the pace of technological change for a least the past two millennia, 2) patent citations and 3) the increasing complexity of tools over time. It shows that combining and modifying pre-existing goods to produce new goods generates the observed historical pattern of technological change. A long period of stasis was followed by sudden super-exponential growth in the number of goods. In this model, the sudden explosion of about 250 years ago is a combinatorial explosion that was a long time in coming, but inevitable once the process began at least two thousand years ago. This Element models the Industrial Revolution as a combinatorial explosion.

• Themen: Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften Naturwissenschaften, allgemein Industrielle Anwendungen der wissenschaftlichen Forschung und technologische Innovation
• ISBN: 9781009386258
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 31.08.2023
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Cambridge University Press