Technology

• 1. Introduction

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  Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. Charles Darwin once called the discovery of fire "possibly the greatest ever made by man". That single line hints at something strange about the subject. The earliest known technology is the stone tool, hammered into shape during prehistory by trial and error. Yet across the same human story we find nuclear weapons, cryptocurrency mixers, and machine ethics. How did a sharpened pebble and an alignment problem for artificial intelligence end up belonging to the same idea? What links the control of fire to the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957? And why does a word that began as the name of an academic discipline now describe almost everything we make? The answers run through brains, furnaces, aqueducts, factories, and a debate over whether progress is always good.

• 2. A Word's Long Journey

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  Dating back to the early 17th century, the term technology once meant simply "systematic treatment", drawn from the Greek Τεχνολογία. An older Ancient Greek word, tékhnē, had already carried a different sense: "knowledge of how to make things", broad enough to include architecture. The word held meanings most modern speakers would not recognize. Starting in the 19th century, continental Europeans used Technik in German or technique in French for a "way of doing". That covered all technical arts, including dancing, navigation, and printing, whether or not tools were involved. Technologie in German and French meant something narrower still, either the academic discipline studying the "methods of arts and crafts" or a political discipline "intended to legislate on the functions of the arts and crafts." English never made the distinction between Technik and Technologie, so both arrived as the single word technology. For a long time the English term was uncommon and mostly named a field of study, a sense preserved in the name of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the 20th century, after the Second Industrial Revolution, technology stopped being treated as a distinct academic discipline and settled into its present meaning: the systemic use of knowledge to practical ends.

• 3. Fire And The Growing Brain

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  Around 2 million years ago, hominids learned to hammer flakes off a pebble to form a sharp hand axe, the first stone tools. About 75 thousand years ago that practice was refined into pressure flaking, which enabled much finer work. These earliest tools came from observation and trial and error, not from any theory. Archaeological, dietary, and social evidence point to continuous human fire-use at least 1.5 million years ago. Fueled with wood and charcoal, fire let early humans cook food to make it more digestible, raising its nutrient value and widening the range of things that could be eaten. The cooking hypothesis proposes that the ability to cook drove an increase in hominid brain size, though some researchers find the evidence inconclusive. Hearths dated to 790 thousand years ago suggest a deeper social shift. Researchers believe gathering around fire intensified human socialization and may have contributed to the emergence of language. Clothing, adapted from the fur and hides of hunted animals, helped humanity push into colder regions, with archaeological evidence dated to 90 to 120 thousand years ago. As early as 380 thousand years ago, humans were constructing temporary wood huts, and around 200 thousand years ago they began migrating out of Africa into Eurasia.

• 4. Farms, Cities, And Metal

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  The Neolithic Revolution, also called the First Agricultural Revolution, sped up technological innovation and raised social complexity. The polished stone axe was a major advance, allowing large-scale forest clearance and farming, though it had already seen use in the preceding Mesolithic in some areas such as Ireland. Agriculture fed larger populations and made settled life possible. Sedentism let families raise more children at once, since infants no longer had to be carried by nomads, and children could contribute labor to crops more readily than to hunting. Population growth brought labor specialization. What pushed early Neolithic villages toward the first cities, such as Uruk, and the first civilizations, such as Sumer, is not specifically known. Hierarchical social structures, specialized labor, trade and war among neighbors, and the need for collective action on challenges like irrigation are all thought to have played a part. Writing spread cultural knowledge and became the basis for history, libraries, schools, and scientific research. Furnaces and bellows gave humans the ability to smelt and forge native metals like gold, copper, silver, and lead. Native copper was probably used from near the start of Neolithic times, about 10 thousand years ago. Working metals eventually led to alloys such as bronze and brass around 4,000 BCE, and the first iron alloys such as steel date to around 1,800 BCE.

• 5. Wheels, Roads, And Water

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  The earliest record of a ship under sail is a Nile boat dating to around 7,000 BCE, the first known use of wind power. Egyptians likely harnessed the annual flooding of the Nile to irrigate their land, gradually learning to regulate it through purpose-built channels and catch basins. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia diverted the Tigris and Euphrates through a complex system of canals and levees. Archaeologists estimate the wheel was invented independently and at roughly the same time in Mesopotamia, the Northern Caucasus, and Central Europe. Time estimates range from 5,500 to 3,000 BCE, with most experts favoring around 4,000 BCE, and the oldest drawings of wheeled carts date from about 3,500 BCE. As of 2024, the oldest known wooden wheel in the world was found in the Ljubljana Marsh of Slovenia, established by Austrian experts to be between 5,100 and 5,350 years old. A stone pottery wheel found in the city-state of Ur dates to around 3,429 BCE. It was the wheel as a transformer of energy, through water wheels, windmills, and treadmills, that opened up nonhuman power sources. The first long-distance road came into use around 3,500 BCE and spanned 2,400 km from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, though it was unpaved and only partially maintained. Around 2,000 BCE the Minoans on Crete built a fully paved 50 km road from the palace of Gortyn through the mountains to the palace of Knossos. At that same Palace of Knossos, archaeologists unearthed a bathtub virtually identical to modern ones, alongside private homes with running water and flushable toilets. The Romans went further with public flush toilets feeding an extensive sewage system, and the primary sewer in Rome, the Cloaca Maxima, begun in the sixth century BCE, is still in use today. Roman aqueducts, the first built in 312 BCE and the eleventh and final in 226 CE, together extended over 450 km.

• 6. Steam, Transistors, And The Information Age

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  Starting in the United Kingdom in the 18th century, steam power set off the Industrial Revolution, transforming agriculture, manufacturing, mining, metallurgy, and transport under the factory system. A century later the Second Industrial Revolution brought rapid scientific discovery, standardization, and mass production. New technologies arrived in clusters: sewage systems, electricity, light bulbs, electric motors, railroads, automobiles, and airplanes, with skyscrapers driving rapid urbanization. The telegraph, telephone, radio, and television reshaped communication. In the 20th century, the discovery of nuclear fission in the Atomic Age produced both nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Vacuum tubes allowed digital computing in machines like the ENIAC, but their sheer size limited use until the transistor, invented in 1947, compacted computers and led the digital transition. Optical fiber and optical amplifiers enabled fast long-distance communication, ushering in the Information Age and the birth of the Internet. The Space Age opened with the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, followed by crewed missions to the moon in the 1960s. Medicine gained diagnostic tools like CT, PET, and MRI scanning, treatments like the dialysis machine, defibrillator, and pacemaker, and research methods like interferon cloning and DNA microarrays. To build and maintain such tools, entire fields developed to support them, including engineering, medicine, and computer science.

• 7. The Argument Over Progress

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  Technological change is the largest cause of long-term economic growth, yet it disrupts as it builds. Past automation both substituted for and complemented labor, replacing workers in lower-paying jobs like agriculture while creating new, higher-paying ones. Studies found that computers did not cause significant net technological unemployment, but artificial intelligence is more capable and still in its infancy, so its effect is unknown. A 2017 survey found no clear consensus among economists on whether AI would raise long-term unemployment. The World Economic Forum's "The Future of Jobs Report 2020" predicted AI would replace 85 million jobs worldwide and create 97 million new ones by 2025. A study by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu found that from 1990 to 2007 in the U.S., one robot per 1,000 workers cut the employment-to-population ratio by 0.2% and lowered wages by 0.42%. The worry is old. Signing the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress bill in 1964, US president Lyndon Johnson said technology was creating "both new opportunities and new obligations for us". Philosophy of technology grew considerably since the 1970s. Marx framed technology as a tool capitalists used to oppress the proletariat, yet he believed it would become a liberating force once "freed from societal deformations". Cultural critic Neil Postman went further, naming "technopolies" as societies dominated by an ideology of technological and scientific progress at the expense of other values, while Herbert Marcuse and John Zerzan warned that technological society would deprive us of freedom and psychological health.

• 8. Risks, Futures, And Other Toolmakers

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  In March 2022, North Korea used Blender.io, a cryptocurrency mixer, to launder over $20.5 million and steal over $600 million worth of cryptocurrency from the owner of the game Axie Infinity. In response, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Blender.io, the first time it had ever acted against a mixer, to crack down on North Korean hackers. Existential risk researchers study threats that could lead to human extinction or civilizational collapse, working at centers like the Cambridge Center for the Study of Existential Risk and the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative. In 2019, philosopher Nick Bostrom introduced the idea of a vulnerable world, "one in which there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default". He urged policymakers to question the assumption that technological progress is always beneficial. In 2005, futurist Ray Kurzweil claimed the next revolution would rest on genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, with robotics the most impactful. Half of machine learning experts surveyed in 2018 believed AI would accomplish every task better and more cheaply than humans by 2063 and automate all human jobs by 2140. The earliest known revolt against technology was Luddism, a pushback against early automation in textile production. Between the 1970s and 1990s, American terrorist Ted Kaczynski carried out bombings across America and published the Unabomber Manifesto, partly inspired by Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society. Humans are not the only toolmakers. Tool use was once thought to define the genus Homo, until it was found among chimpanzees, dolphins, and crows. West African chimpanzees use stone hammers and anvils to crack nuts, as do capuchin monkeys of Boa Vista, Brazil, and beaver dams built with sticks and stones reshape river habitats with dramatic effects.