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29 results

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Explaining Technology
  • Explaining Technology
  • Roger Koppl, Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, Abigail Devereaux, Brian Fath, James Herriott, Wim Hordijk, Stuart Kauffman, Robert Ulanowicz, Sergi Valverde
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date: August 2023
  • Print publication: 31 August 2023
  • View abstract
    A long tradition explains technological change as recombination. Within this tradition, this Element develops an innovative combinatorial model of technological change and tests it with 2,000 years of global GDP data and with data from US patents filed between 1835 and 2010. The model explains 1) the pace of technological change for a least the past two millennia, 2) patent citations and 3) the increasing complexity of tools over time. It shows that combining and modifying pre-existing goods to produce new goods generates the observed historical pattern of technological change. A long period of stasis was followed by sudden super-exponential growth in the number of goods. In this model, the sudden explosion of about 250 years ago is a combinatorial explosion that was a long time in coming, but inevitable once the process began at least two thousand years ago. This Element models the Industrial Revolution as a combinatorial explosion.

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