MachineMachine /stream

Technology so pervades our culture that it's sobering to consider how poorly we understand it. How do new tools and techniques arise? What principles guide their evolution? And how does their existence inform the larger economy?

In The Nature of Technology (Free Press, $27), economist W. Brian Arthur sets out to establish a coherent theory describing fundamentally what technology is, how it evolves, and how it spurs innovation and industry. Technology, he finds, "builds itself organically from itself" in a process that resembles chemistry and in some ways even recalls life itself.

Currently a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Arthur taught economics at Stanford for 13 years. His work has won the Schumpeter Prize in economics and the Lagrange Prize in complexity science. American Scientist Online managing editor Greg Ross spoke with him in August 2009.