TecC 03 - A Stepping Stone: The Beginnings of Innovation
Scratching the surface, building a rock-solid foundation
Last time I proposed to you one of several ways of looking at reality - the technocentric view, one based on what I’m calling ‘technology’, which is in fact not what you would normally think I’m referring to. It’s not about phones and fancy gadgets, it’s not about code and complicated configurations on that dreaded device low on battery! And it’s certainly not about getting that damn printer to work again!
Instead, let’s go way back to the pristine garden of Eden of first principles and the theoretical foundations - of technology and the technocentric view! I am referring here to technology in the broadest sense of the term possible - all human action on the environment which results in something that would otherwise not exist - in other words, a divergence from nature.
Is that good? Is that bad? Well, it’s human! That’s what makes us different in a very fundamental sense from other creatures: we take something from our environment and fashion it in ways that serve a need, and we pass this on to others, both here and to future generations. (This is not something other animals do to any notable and lasting degree.)
Understanding how this works, from the ground up as I will endeavor to here, is important, because, in the technocentric paradigm, that’s everything!1 That’s what will inform this approach of making sense of everything around us. It’s the paradigm, I proffer, we will employ in the current series to explain how the world around us — in particular what we do normally perceive as technology in its more prevalent sense — all works. And, as I’ve promised you need not have any technical background or qualification to join me on this journey.
The birth of technology
Taking this broad view, we can trace the birth of technology in a lasting sense to the very first time man – this could refer to one of the earliest hominid species — took a piece of stone, just big enough to grip it comfortably in his hand around his palm2 and thought, hmm, if I rub this against that rock and make this side of it sharper, it’s going to be easier to attack and capture that elusive bison over there, because I’m hungry and it looks rather tasty!
Ok, maybe that’s not how it started, maybe the theorizing and the explanations came later, it was perhaps by accident that the earliest humans found that rubbing a stone with another — maybe Steve3 was bored that day! — could sharpen it making it more akin to a tooth, but more significantly more versatile and practical than a human tooth in injuring and capturing prey.
But in the end, that’s what it was - this more or less first of many tools humanity will go on to make, this sharpened piece of stone, the handaxe, was indeed an augmentation of the tooth (they had very likely used a tooth off of the carcass of a large animal in attacking prey, which perhaps gave them the idea in the first place!)
This might seem rather trivial or meh to us, but it’s hard to overstate what a phenomenal revolution, what an extraordinary breakthrough, what a game-changer it was!4 But in a sense, we implicitly accept that it wasn’t trivial - because we have named an entire epoch based on essentially this one event - the Stone Age!
Well again, it’s probably not this one exact incident, but what matters is the general principle here - of modifying pieces of that very abundant material found around these primitive hominid groups, stone, into something useful - useful for human needs.
So in that sense, it was not just the beginning of the Stone Age, but it was the birth of technology!
The immediate effects of this of course were far-reaching. It helped the species conquer the environment around it rapidly rising to the top of the pecking order! This was despite being one of the physically weaker and more vulnerable members of the landscape, the African Savannah. What man had found was the ability to use tools, humans had stumbled upon technology! And that changed everything!
Before we continue, I would add another dimension to my definition of the term ‘technology’ here, still within my broad, first-principles treatment. I would make two distinctions of technology here - what I’ll call artefactual5 and institutional.
Because, in this overarching definition of the phenomenon, we have not just the physical or tangible tools and implements devised — the artefacts, but also other — cognitive processes and solutions, that need to be included, because they’re all also the result of humans changing their environment, and have a very important role to play in how the world has unfolded, in this technocentric journey we are on here.
By institutional I mean therefore the use of devices such as legal frameworks, social organization methods, indeed even language itself, as part of our increasingly complex reality. These are based on both explicit norms and agreements but also other things such as behaviors ingrained in us as part of being involved in such a social setup as we are.
In fact, artefactual and institutional developments go hand in hand. (I admit that in more popular discourse only the former is referred to under the term ‘technology’, but from our vantage point here, such an unorthodox integrated view can, as we’ll see in later conversations, come in handy.)
So… I hear you say, this is all well and good, but what is the connection between a stone someone threw at a bison and this complex reality you mention? Yes, we’ll build on this, stone by stone - I’ve already said we shall leave no stone unturned! Yes, we’ll build on this step by step, this is just the first of many a stepping stone!
This is not an ideological position, but more of a practical, and epistemologically honest, choice in order to facilitate greater comprehension of the things observed. This must perforce be supplemented by other polyontic paradigms such as will be discussed in the parallel Polymathon stream.
Other primates couldn’t have done this, they don’t have an opposable thumb!
Encyclopedic source: Eddie Izzard! 😉
‘game-changer’ in more than one sense, it changed the nature of the game they caught, and…
What in a bygone age might have been called ‘artificial’! The word ‘artificial’, back in the 50s when the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was coined, did not have the same connotation of ‘fake’ or ‘synthetic’ is we have now. It rather referred to ‘artifice’, meaning ‘human device, human ingenuity’, and was related to the word ‘artifact’ or ‘artefact’ which still retains that sense. Hence my choice of term (and spelling)!