Technology: Why & How We Invent It
A question I’m often asked in my work with tech companies as a technology anthropologist is how we go about inventing technologies in the first place. Most assume it’s because we need to solve a problem. In part, that is right. And perhaps more so as technologies have advanced. But it goes deeper than that.
Homo Sapiens learned thousands of years ago that technology was key to survival. In part because we watched other hominid species, like neanderthals and Denisovans use technology. And we stole, or copied, that technology for ourselves. Perhaps using some as weapons to take out other species. Perhaps not. It’s probably a wee bit more complicated than that.
We aren’t entirely sure why homo sapiens became the dominant hominid. There are many theories. Humans, unlike other animals, became very adept at surviving across multiple niches. Most every other animal species only survive in one niche. A polar bear adapted to the cold of the arctic and would not survive on a beach in the Bahamas.
It is highly likely that we stole the use of fire and stone tools from our distant relatives. Whether they liked it or not. There are plenty of cases of animals copying from other animals. And while we humans like to think we’re not animals, we are. One thing that sets us apart from our fellow animals however, is our ability to imagine, which plays a role in why we developed language and why we use stories to navigate our realities.
Let’s say we snuck up behind a rather smelly, noisy bunch of neanderthals one night and managed to steal some fire and a stone axe or two. From then on, up until today, all the technologies we have developed came from our imagination.
One of our superpowers as Homo Sapiens, may well have been our imaginative capacity versus other species. We don’t know this for sure. But from that fire we stole around 500,000 years or so ago, we eventually arrived at that one piece of technology that has helped us imagine some of those most profound and complex technologies of the 21st century; the microchip.
All of this is because we have a unique ability to imagine the future. We invent technologies sometimes out of necessity, to survive, but that is because we imagine a way to change the future state from the present one. All technologies are a result of an imagined future. A desired outcome that one person can see in their imagination.
And from one invention, others use their imaginations to make it better and imagine other uses, other future possibilities and realities. Thus, we imagine a technology, then others imagine other uses and technology evolves.
One person imagined that they could harness steam. Baseline technologies are ones that harness a phenomenon such as steam, fire or electricity. In the 18th century, Thomas Savery imagined how a steam pump could get water out of coal mines. From there, someone else imagined using it for train engines, then cars and ships. Interestingly, the idea of a steam engine has been traced back to Roman Vitruvius between 30 and 15 BC.
You might then, with all the recent hype, wonder if Artificial Intelligence (AI) might in future imagine new technologies. Perhaps. But imagination is a part of our consciousness and right now, we do not have a definition for consciousness. Or intelligence. Some AI tools, perhaps Neural Networks and Machine Learning combined with Generative AI, could evolve upon existing technologies. We’ve seen this with using AI tools to create new antibiotics. But could AI imagine entirely new technologies that we haven’t or maybe couldn’t, think of? Maybe. Jury’s out.
As I’ve written before, technology is a part of what it means to be human. We cannot exist without technology. We use our imaginations to create technology, then we apply culture to figure out how we will integrate it into our lives and societies.
