I first read this book in 2010, the summer before I started a PhD in science and technology studies. I remember picking it up at Kramerbooks in Dupont Circle, grabbing a beer at Afterwords, and then staying up all night reading it. Since then, I've read countless pages and megabytes of theory and history about technology, innovation, and the entanglements of politics and things. If anything, The Nature of Technology holds up even better than it did then.

Arthur offers a simple, yet powerful, model for understanding technology. A technology is one or more physical phenomenon captured to fulfill human needs. Technologies exhibit modular structure, from the literal nuts and bolts that fasten sub-units together, to a global transportation system that lets you airmail a package from Washington to Ulan Bator with a simple address. Physical principles are like veins of ore in the Earth, exposed and made ready for use by science, and grouped into domains by similarity (the electrical phenomenon, the thermal phenomenon, etc). Engineers gain fluency in the design principles of a domain, which they use to extend the range and power of technology.

Innovation is based around combinatorial evolution, a statement backed up by experiments on circuit design using genetic algorithms and NAND gates. Technologies become instantiated in modules, which are hooked up in different configurations. Innovation is accelerating, because modules are cheaper and easier to connect than before. Gradual evolution is punctuated by transitions to new domains, radical redefinition of technology that blow past previous limits, once the initial bugs are worked out.

There is some fuzziness around the nature of domains, and the links between science and technology, and the actual structure of innovation, but Arthur gets closer to capturing these processes on paper than other writer that I know.