Suppose in some parallel universe history proceeded down a quite different path from our own, shortly after Homo sapiens evolved. If we fast forward to 2022 of that universe, how different would the technological stratum of that parallel universe be from our own? Would they have invented the wheel? Steam engines? Railroads? Cars? Computers? Internet? Social media? Or would their technologies rely on principles entirely alien to us? In other words, once humans find themselves in a place where technological improvement is the rule (hardly a given!), is the form of the technology they create inevitable? Or is it the stuff of contingency and accident?
In academic lingo, this is a question about path dependency. How much path dependency is there in technology?
This week's podcast is a bit unusual. I designed New Things Under the Sun to feature two kinds of articles: claims and arguments. Almost everything I write (and podcast) is a claim article. Today’s podcast is the other kind of thing, an argument.
The usual goal of a claim article is to synthesize several academic papers in service of assessing a specific narrow claim about innovation. Argument articles live one level up the chain of abstraction: the goal is to synthesize many claim articles (referenced mostly in footnotes) in service of presenting a bigger picture argument. That means in this podcast you won’t hear me talk much about specific papers; instead, I’ll talk about various literatures and how I think they interact with each other.
This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article Are technologies inevitable?, originally published on New Things Under the Sun.