Preview
  • The Nature of Technology

  • What It Is and How It Evolves
  • By: W. Brian Arthur
  • Narrated by: Victor Bevine
  • Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (121 ratings)

Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Nature of Technology

By: W. Brian Arthur
Narrated by: Victor Bevine
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $21.95

Buy for $21.95

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

"More than any thing else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being," says W. Brian Arthur. Yet until now, the major questions of technology have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from -- how exactly does invention work? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Why are certain regions -- Cambridge, England, in the 1920s and Silicon Valley today -- hotbeds of innovation, while others languish? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? How do new industries, and the economy itself, emerge from technologies? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur sets forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology that gives answers to these questions.

The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology's origins and evolution. It achieves for the progress of technology what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress. Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works.

Conventional thinking ascribes the invention of technologies to "thinking outside the box", or vaguely to genius or creativity, but Arthur shows that such explanations are inadequate. Rather, technologies are put together from pieces - themselves technologies - that already exist. Technologies therefore share common ancestries and combine, morph, and combine again to create further technologies. Technology evolves much as a coral reef builds itself from activities of small organisms -- it creates itself from itself; all technologies are descended from earlier technologies.

Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, and writing in wonderfully engaging and clear prose, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives.

©2009 W. Brian Arthur (P)2009 Audible, Inc.
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Critic reviews

"Arthur's arguments will likely alter the reader's way of thinking about technology and its relationship to humanity." (Publishers Weekly)
"We launched Java based on Brian Arthur's ideas." (Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google)

What listeners say about The Nature of Technology

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    65
  • 4 Stars
    22
  • 3 Stars
    21
  • 2 Stars
    7
  • 1 Stars
    6
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    43
  • 4 Stars
    23
  • 3 Stars
    7
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    3
Story
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    45
  • 4 Stars
    11
  • 3 Stars
    15
  • 2 Stars
    3
  • 1 Stars
    2

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

What’s the point

3 chapters in amd still seems like the prologue.
Needs to have some meat on the bone.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Thought-provoking

I found this book truly thought-provoking. While the style of writing could potentially feel a bit pedantic to some, the author's way of breaking down and then reconstructing technology is wonderfully logical and comprehensive. His examples resonate and illuminate his thesis quite well. I found myself applying the concepts to countless additional technological developments and feeling that this book helped me interpret them quite effectively. I especially liked the thoughtful way he connected technology to economic development, which I find few other writers have done in a way that helps further understanding of either technology or the economy.

The narration was notable for being not very notable.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

mind blowing

perfect reader and great content. one of the seminal books of the new century. Amazing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Love Brian Arthur & thesis but theory not perfect

I'm a huge Brian Arthur fan. His early work on Increasing Returns to Scale and Path Dependence -- initially rejected by virtually every reputable economics journal -- was brilliant. As one of the founding members of Santa Fe Institute studying complexity science -- the most important area of scientific study today -- Arthur is an extremely important figure in the paradigm shift in economics currently (albeit slowly) under way.

The Nature of Technology (TNOT) was a fascinating read that deftly explains how new technologies come to be. While there's no great aha-moment that opens up some new novel way of thinking about technology, it does adequately explain how technological developments emerge.

Through a very narrow lens you can call it evolutionary, perhaps the same way a chef mixing two heretofore uncombined ingredients that create a delicious new dish is evolutionary. But in the broader Darwinian sense, what's posited in TNOT is not evolutionary. Genetic mutations that Darwin wrote about were needed for the species to survive. The same theory was further explained by Richards Dawkins' spectacular The Selfish Gene.

The modern day technological developments described in TNOT did not arise out of necessity so much as out of convenience (and logic) -- that is, combining multiple existing technologies to create something novel and new.

The five stars were for how thorough his analysis was. I still think it's worth the credit.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Pretty good- not as good as it was hyped

I would still recommend this book to anybody interested in science, technology, business or similar related fields. Some ideas are great. But I found lots of rambling and long-winded paragraphs making it not that interesting.

And also, most of the arguments represent author’s passion or meditation more than the fruit of his long career as a distinguished researcher.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    out of 5 stars

Not very interesting

It was BORING!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!