Technology

Benjamin Franklin defined man as “the tool-making animal.” If he had added the phrase “with foresight,” he would have adequately described Homo faber, man the technologist.

Inventiveness was the indispensable condition for the survival of the human species. Without fur or feather, carapace or scale, ancestral man stood naked to the elements; and without fang or claw or tusk to fight his predators, without speed to elude them, without camouflage to deceive them or the ability to take to the trees like his cousin, the ape, he was physically at a hopeless disadvantage. What he developed to deal with his deficiencies was the capacity to invent. He possessed not only sensory perceptions (though these were less acute than those of many of his fellow creatures), he also possessed imagination and finger-skills. He did not just improvise to meet an emergency as an ape might in using a broken branch as a weapon; he also saw the need for keeping a club handy—he planned ahead. Other creatures had their inherited instincts, their built-in experience. Some, like the beaver or the weaverbird, with their biological tools, could contrive quite elaborate structures; others, like the bees or the ants, could evolve efficient organizations; others, like the squirrel, were provident in the sense of laying in stores. With nimbleness of brain and hand, a combination of gray matter and motor-cells, man could scheme to outreach, with club, or spear or sling, his natural enemies; he could manage nature and escape from the restraints of his environment. He clothed himself in pelts and moved to inhospitable climes, he mastered fire and dared to bring it into his dwelling for heating and cooking, he learned to cultivate and plant the soil, he domesticated animals, and he devised specialized tools like the hoe and the ax to improve the efficiency of his labour.

From earliest time and beginning with the simplest contrivances, every discovery and invention has depended on the fact that the human being is not only a perceptual but also a conceptual creature capable of observing, memorizing, and juxtaposing images. He can make a mental design, a techno-poetic fantasy, even when the means of actually producing it are not available. Seven hundred years ago Roger Bacon could imagine a power-driven ship, a horseless carriage, an airplane, the miniaturized servo-motor, “but one finger in length and one in width,” and the bathysphere. The vision cannot materialize, however, unless man has the method. This is the process by which he makes an observation (perceptual); forms a hypothesis (conceptual); experiments to test this “hunch”; formulates a theory to justify his insights; and by further proofs produces “laws” according to which anyone can go on repeating the results. With spoken language, he can transfer experience, father to son, master to apprentice, generation to generation. With written language, he can produce the textbooks that are the ready-reckoners for other innovators who thereby do not have to rediscover Newton’s laws or the laws of thermodynamics every few years. This systematic treatment of the arts and crafts is the simplest expression of the meaning of “technology,” from the Greek roots techne, arts, and logia, words. The ancient Greeks had no such combined term because their philosophers divorced manual skills from intellectual pursuits. Plato berated Eudoxus and Archytas when by experiments and recourse to instruments they solved problems that the theorists considered insoluble. He accused them of “making use of matter which requires manual labour and is the object of servile trades.”

This intellectual condescension still persists, although individual technologists have won recognition from scientific societies and learned academies. The prejudice is suggested by the acceptance of the term “science and technology.” Yet both science and technology use the scientific method. Was Leonardo da Vinci, apart from being an artist, a scientist or a technologist? In terms of discovering and testing new knowledge he was a man of science, but his designs for practical innovations outnumbered those of Thomas Alva Edison. Edison, 400 years later, patented over 1,000 inventions. They included major ones, for which he is remembered, but also hundreds of bits of useful hardware, important in their way. He made only one scientific discovery, the Edison effect, which he patented but did not pursue. The rest were derived from scientific knowledge and developments. He saw the profitable relevancies that lesser men missed; he fitted the mental nut to the mental bolt and created things.

Customarily, science, or the scientific hierarchy, is divided into four categories:

Pure, or academic, research is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. It is mainly the work of an individual, or the group he leads. The pure scientist has to justify himself only before a jury of his peers. He is judged not by the usefulness but by the integrity of his work. He is the Maker Possible.

Oriented fundamental research is still basic science; that is to say, the scientist is still questioning nature, seeking to extend knowledge and understanding, but he is not a free agent indulging his curiosity. He is restrained within a frame of reference. For instance, in studying chemical reactions at high pressures he is not assuming that he is going to discover polyethylene, or if he is studying gases at high temperatures he is not necessarily thinking of jet engines or rockets; but he is compiling data that will be important in a general field and likely to have some foreseen applications. In the big corporations, this is called “speculative research.” Such a scientist is likely to have adequate research facilities, endowments, or contracts. He is the Maker Probable.

Applied research is programmed research. The target is specified, and results are expected. The predicted yield is the measure of the support. The scientist is held accountable in the annual report. He is the Maker to Happen.

Development is really technology, but coupling it with research (R and D) keeps it in the scientific hierarchy and away from the “rude mechanicals.” It is the transfer of laboratory results, through the pilot plant, to the production line. R and D is far and away the most expensive scientific bracket because large-scale trial and error (“back to the drawing board”) involves multimillions of dollars. The R and D scientist is the Maker to Work.

Through the craft guilds and their “mysteries” and their conversion to factory methods, technology had an evolutionary history in many cultures and many lands. Alfred North Whitehead claimed that “the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.” Nowhere was this better demonstrated than at Edison’s “invention factory” at Menlo Park, New Jersey, where, starting in 1876, Edison organized the first industrial research laboratory. In folklore, he is regarded as a “loner,” who invented by intuition. In fact, he systematized the process of invention, coordinating and applying relevant knowledge through a hard-worked team that included mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and skilled mechanics. Invention was no longer the private indulgence of the gifted amateur or the rare professional; a techno-methodology had been created to guarantee commercial success. In Edison’s case the result was often a “package deal”—not just the incandescent lamp, but the generating plant and the transmission system. In the case of Henry Ford, it was not just the Model T, but the assembly line, which he enlarged to a factory that was one-fifth of a mile long, with a conveyor-belt system that synchronized each stage of construction with the delivery of each part to the operator. He embodied scientific management, with its time-and-motion studies and production engineering.

The feedback system between the know-why (academic science) and the know-how (technology) is recalibrating the time-function of change. A new scientific discovery (explanation of a phenomenon) is seized by the technologists and put to work. In turn the technologists provide the instruments that, with greater refinements and speed, enable the scientists to make further discoveries. An outstanding example is cybernetics. The pencil-and-paper mathematicians had long known the principles of the computer, but they had to wait for the post-World War II electronic engineers to produce the “hardware.” Now with instant responses, or nearly so, and vast computer capacities and prodigious “memories,” with means not only for numerical calculation but for logical simulation, with feedback (like a burned finger signaling to the brain and the brain withdrawing the finger from the hot plate), scientists are not only able to do calculations so complex that they would not previously have attempted them, but they are also learning, from the engineers, about the nature of systems, including the systems of nature itself. Cybernetics deals with the information-processing aspects, as distinguished from the energy-transforming aspects, of all systems regardless of their physical nature. This has facilitated the development of automatic control, telecommunications, and computing; it is applicable also to systems engineering, economics, and neurophysiology.

Though we acknowledge the truth of Whitehead’s aphorism, his essentially engineering approach to technology is too restrictive. Every advance in the practical arts from hunting to food-gathering to cultivation, to animal husbandry, to irrigation, to mining, and on through construction, transportation, food-processing, heating, power generation, lighting, communications, military engineering, and clinical medicine has produced social and cultural changes. The Neolithic Revolution was as climacteric as the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, the preoccupation with Western technology ignores the cultural origins of many major innovations and forgets that, historically, the European Dark Ages (not so dark as is often supposed) coincided with Golden Ages of material advances in China, India, and pre-Columbian America. Only in recent years have historians (Singer, Crombie, Lynn White, Hall, Needham, Forbes, and others) given serious attention to these facts. The anthropologists, looking at cultural influences, have been similarly remiss. Economists have been preoccupied with the “production function” and sociologists with the social effects of innovation (from television to freeways) and with work-force redundancy. The present distortions, produced by rapid technological change, obscure the fact that civilization itself derived from excess production and redundancy. When agriculture surpassed subsistence, fewer tillers were required to support the cities, with their artisans (specializing in other forms of production), their priesthoods, their scholars, their soldiery and warrior-kings, their tithe-gatherers, their merchants, and their money-changers. Technological displacement today, whether it is called unemployment, underemployment, leisure, or nonwork, similarly calls for social readjustments to find nonmanufacturing expressions of human capacities.

No explanation of the intrinsic or historic attributes of technology can convey the love-hate overtones that the term has acquired. In the ogre sense of the word, it has become a threat to lives and livelihoods and to the total environment. In the efficiency sense, it is hailed as the methodological solution of all our problems from government administration to the production of miracle grains to abolish hunger. Some, like Jacques Ellul and B. F. Skinner, claim that we are already the hostages of our man-made environment: the first maintaining that technology has taken over all of man’s activities and not just his productive activities; the second, that autonomous man, with free will and freedom and dignity, is now an anachronism and has to be intentionally controlled by the “technology of behaviour.”

Obviously this usage is stretching the meaning of “technology” beyond the foregoing derivations and descriptions—the etymology; the cultural origins; the scientific precedents; the nuts-and-bolts and something popularly promoted to capital letters as “The Machine.” This usage expands even Harold Lasswell’s accommodating version: “The ensemble of practices by which one uses available resources to achieve values.” It is more consistent with the French la technique, which refers to any complex of standardized means for attaining predetermined ends. Thus it would apply to organization, government institutions, systems of politics or religions, or anything which reduces spontaneous or impulsive behaviour to a rationale. As was said of la technique of wartime operational research, “it ran the war by numerical thinking instead of gusts of emotion.”

In adventurously exploring the three divisions and fifteen sections of the encyclopaedia’s treatment of technology of which this introduction is, hopefully, the appetizer, the reader will find other interpretations and probably produce his own. In common usage, however, the preoccupation is with “The Machine” and the effects of its products on our lives.

Resentment against the replacement of men by machines goes back beyond Ned Ludd and the machine-wreckers of the Industrial Revolution, but present-day attitudes are of a different order of magnitude. They derive from the speed and scale of change. Hahn and Strassmann’s laboratory discovery of uranium fission in 1938 was transformed into a nuclear bomb in 1945. If there is no nuclear war, history will consider the Manhattan Project, which produced the bomb, as important as the bomb it produced. It is the archetype of the crash program in which men, materials, and methods are mobilized to attain an objective in a given time. Man on the Moon by 1970 was another example, with the time-target beaten by six months. The time-lapse between a fundamental scientific discovery and its practical application has been reduced from centuries to decades to years to months. Since World War II, we have had the Atomic Age, the Cybernetic Age, the Space Age, and now the Bioengineering Age, in which not only by organ transplants but also by the deliberate manipulation of genes it may be possible to engineer the nature of man himself. Thus in the growing up of the postwar generation there have been four major epochs nearly as significant as the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution. At the same time there has come the shocked awareness of the effects on the environment of the wastes of technology. Again this is a matter of scale and lack of prescience. (The ore miners and metal workers of Cyprus and Asia Minor were polluting the Mediterranean with heavy metals 5,000 years ago, but the effects were insignificant compared with volcanic debris.) When people complain, however, of “interference with the environment” they should be mindful that such interference has been the sine qua non of the survival of Homo sapiens. Moreover, when we try to get rid of our guilt-sense about the effects of misused technology and reject the gadgeting we ashamedly enjoy, we should not go too far and “throw out the baby with the bathwater.” We cannot go back to the apes nor even to Arcadia.

The great problem is how to force ebullient technology and its transnational expansion to produce human well-being, not just in the quantity of artifacts but in improving the quality of life, including redressing of the mischief in the environment. This requires an enlightened and informed society that knows what it wants and is not cult-ridden or crash-programmed into accepting what it does not want or need. This cannot be achieved through programmed learning nor the technology of behaviour nor systems engineering. We are back with the know-why as the initiator and the monitor of the know-how.