In studying the potential and limits of technology, there's stunningly little discussion of what technology is and how it achieves its ends.

John Stuart Mill distinguishes science from the "arts" (the term for "technology" in the 19th century) as "science most conveniently follows the classification of causes, while arts must necessarily be classified according to the classification of the effects", from Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy.[1]

There's some discussion of the nature of technology, W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology , and Kevin Kelley's What Technology Wants, as well as several titles by Steven Johnson. The contribution of philosophy to the question is generally unsatisfying, though there are Jaques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Michel Foucault, and Martin Heidegger.[2] None of these are themselves technologists, which whilst providing some stand-off distance also manifests much ignorance.

I've found useful to consider what the specific mechanisms of technology are, and have come up with a nine-part breakdown, which I refer to as the ontology of technological mechanisms:

- Fuels & energy sources: Primary means for effecting change in a system. Biomass, fossil fuels, nuclear energy, environmental fluxes (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc.)

- Materials: Stuff we build and process with, both structural and feedstocks. Stone, wood, fibre, vitrified materials, metals, chemicals, fluids, etc.

- Power transmission and transformation: Conversions between types or forms of power, from simple mechanisms to electronics and quantum effects.

- Process knowledge: Specific "how to" knowledge, "technology" in the vernacular.

- Causal knowledge: Understanding of properties and mechanisms, "science" in the vernacular.

- Networks: Links and nodes, physical or virtual. Transportation, communications, knowledge itself.

- Systems: Process with feedback.

- Information: Sensing, parsing, storage & retrieval, processing, and transmission.

- Hygiene effects: Dealing with unintended or undesired consequences.

The classification has seemed reasonably stable and useful to me for some years now.

From this a few aspects become clearer:

1. Each modality has its capabilities and limitations. E.g., materials vary in properties and abundance.

2. Some modalities scale linearly (e.g., the effects of additional energy are generally directly proportional to inputs), some exponentially (networks and systems), others seem to be emergent and impose non-evident but long-term costs (hygiene).

3. Virtually all exponential change seems to involve or rely highly upon network effects. These are only a limited set of modalities.

4. Tremendous advances in raw capabilities in specific areas (e.g., information) seem to provide at best limited real-world outcomes. E.g., multi-millionfold increases in computational capabilities have resulted in extension of useful weather forecasting only by a factor of days. Efficiencies of automobile and aircraft transport improve with increased informational capacities, but only to inherent limitations defined by physics (drag coefficients, Carnot / Rankine efficiency).

We can also look at specific areas of technological progress ... or stagnation ... and see where these fall within the structure. Keep in mind that a given real-world technology, say, computer chips, typically covers a set of these factors, say, networks, systems, materials, and process knowledge, in the case of semiconductors.

What all of this suggests to me is that even with considerable future potential in certain areas, we're likely to see limitations imposed by other elements of the ontology.

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Notes:

1. Previously discussed with a longer quotation here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23000911>. Source: <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12004/12004-h/12004-h.htm#FNa...>

2. See generally: <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/>