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Technology is a set of evolving ideas. New technologies evolve by colliding and combining with other technologies. Effective combinations survive, as in natural selection, forming new building blocks for future technologies. Invention is a cumulative, compounding process. It feeds on itself. The more technologies there are,3 the more they can in turn become components of other new technologies so that, in the words of the economist W. Brian Arthur, “the overall collection of technologies bootstraps itself upward from the few to the many and from the simple to the complex.” Technology is hence like a language or chemistry: not a set of independent entities and practices, but a commingling set of parts to combine and recombine.
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