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Explaining Technology

Robert E Ulanowicz author Roger Koppl author James Herriot author Roberto Cazzolla Gatti author Brian D Fath author Stuart Kauffman author Abigail Devereaux author Wim Hordijk author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:31st Aug '23

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Explaining Technology cover

This Element describes a combinatory model of technological change that explains both world economic history and the Anthropocene crisis.

This Element develops an innovative combinatorial model of technological change and tests it with 2,000 years of data from global GDP data and US patents, thus generating the observed historical pattern of technological change. This Element models the Industrial Revolution as a combinatorial explosion.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.

ISBN: 9781009386258

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 138g

75 pages