Years ago, while reading Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe, an essay on Self Organization and Complexity, I got struck by the following sentence:
“The car comes in and drives the horse out. When the horse goes, so does the smithy, the saddler, the stable, the harness shop, buggies, and in your West, our goes the Pony Express. But once cars are around, it makes sense to expand the oil industry, build gas stations dotted over the countryside, and pave the roads. Once the roads are paved, people start driving all over creation, so motels make sense. What with the speed, traffic lights, traffic cops, traffic courts, and the quiet bribe to get off your parking ticket make their way into the economy and our behavior patterns.”
This statement – as the author explained – did not belong to Kauffman himself but to W. Brian Arthur, economist, and very well known inventor of the El Farol Bar problem, a landmark within the Game Theory models.
I found – and still find – this Arthur’s statement enlightening: Economy as an ecosystem where major forces may change forever the overall landscape.
It also has a direct impact on Competitive Strategy, specifically when it comes to the possibility of Changing the Rule of the Games, like when transistors were used instead of tubes or Nintendo WII introduced an innovative remote control, which dramatically changed the way to think about video games and related user experience (just to make a couple of examples).
Since then, for many years I have been waiting for Brian Arthur’s masterpiece, the book that would have represented a sort of new start on how collective economy should have been conceived.
After 15 years, the book in subject has been finally published and titled “The Nature of Technology – What it is and how it evolves”.
The Author spends an entire book to define what Technology is and how it evolves and co evolves: the book per se is fine, but after 15 years my expectations were pretty much different. Personally, I was hoping to see some light shed to some fundamental questions like:
— If a new technology comes is, how does it spread within a Market?
— How long does it survive before changing into something else?
— When an ecosystem is a closed circle (a virtuous circle), how much robust is it to external disturbance?
Well, if you expect this kind of questions – and possibly answers – just forget the book.
If you are interested in dissect the technology definition, you might be interested to have a look at it.
As per myself, I’ll give Brian Arthur another chance and wait for another 15 years…
“The car comes in and drives the horse out. When the horse goes, so does the smithy, the saddler, the stable, the harness shop, buggies, and in your West, our goes the Pony Express. But once cars are around, it makes sense to expand the oil industry, build gas stations dotted over the countryside, and pave the roads. Once the roads are paved, people start driving all over creation, so motels make sense. What with the speed, traffic lights, traffic cops, traffic courts, and the quiet bribe to get off your parking ticket make their way into the economy and our behavior patterns.”
This statement – as the author explained – did not belong to Kauffman himself but to W. Brian Arthur, economist, and very well known inventor of the El Farol Bar problem, a landmark within the Game Theory models.
I found – and still find – this Arthur’s statement enlightening: Economy as an ecosystem where major forces may change forever the overall landscape.
It also has a direct impact on Competitive Strategy, specifically when it comes to the possibility of Changing the Rule of the Games, like when transistors were used instead of tubes or Nintendo WII introduced an innovative remote control, which dramatically changed the way to think about video games and related user experience (just to make a couple of examples).
Since then, for many years I have been waiting for Brian Arthur’s masterpiece, the book that would have represented a sort of new start on how collective economy should have been conceived.
After 15 years, the book in subject has been finally published and titled “The Nature of Technology – What it is and how it evolves”.
The Author spends an entire book to define what Technology is and how it evolves and co evolves: the book per se is fine, but after 15 years my expectations were pretty much different. Personally, I was hoping to see some light shed to some fundamental questions like:
— If a new technology comes is, how does it spread within a Market?
— How long does it survive before changing into something else?
— When an ecosystem is a closed circle (a virtuous circle), how much robust is it to external disturbance?
Well, if you expect this kind of questions – and possibly answers – just forget the book.
If you are interested in dissect the technology definition, you might be interested to have a look at it.
As per myself, I’ll give Brian Arthur another chance and wait for another 15 years…
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