Let me just ask what you’re excited about these days.

What you’re personally working on or thinking about.

Well, as I’m sure it’s pretty clear, I'm

excited that we’re -- we meaning

myself and a number of other people in economics

are having a stab at

generalizing the field to this adaptive nonlinear point of view

So that greatly excites me. The other thing I’ve been looking at

and this has been quite a long time, it’s a long-term project,

is that I got very interested in the whole question of where

economies came from

How does an economy come about?

And you could tell some stories

maybe I breed sheep and you chisel

some sort of obsidian and then you and I can meet

I will trade you wool for a sharp edge

obsidian objects and things like that, and there’s a certain amount of

that going on. But if you look at

economies over the long term, say

there’s a lot of agriculture and then in Europe

the Industrial Revolution comes along around the 1780s

so new textile machinery and steam

engines and railroads and still later

heavy engineering and steel works and industrial chemicals

and then mass production and then

electronics and then the digital economy and photonics

etc. Biotech, nanotech,

What you see is that what really drives the economy and forms the economy

is its technologies.

So I studied this for about 12 years

My background is as an engineer, so this is something

that greatly interested me. And I wrote a book, The Nature of

Technology on this, about

it came out about 3 or 4 years ago.

What interests me is that in economics

a lot of people, just to go back a little bit a couple of hundred years

ago, good economists would all have said yes,

the economy emerges from its technologies

So that wasn’t in contention a couple of hundred

years ago. But if people tried to look at how

an economy builds itself out of its technologies, then

they have to say, well, where do technologies come from? And that

looks like an amorphous hodge podge. It’s just a sludge

of technologies and --- little new ones

pop up invented supposedly by

geniuses. What fascinated me

and what I discovered is that there’s a huge amount of structure

to how technology evolves. That new technologies

are always combinations of

previous technologies. Xerox PARC where I work

invented the laser printer, plus an awful lot of other things

A laser printer is put together from the computer

processor and a laser and a Xerox machine

The computer tells the laser where to point,

and the laser paints images

or objects on a Xerox drum, and the rest is

just copying. So you get this combination

and it turns out that’s true for all technologies, that they're

all combinations of other technologies

that are already in use. It’s not a very obvious thing

It takes a lot of persuading, but this is true.

Now if that’s true, then technologies aren’t just blurping

up or out of the mud of

technologies. Technologies are actually a vast network of

things. Individual technologies that

are coming together to create new technologies. So

there’s a network of ancestry in technologies.

You could then say, well, you’re talking

really about the theory of evolution for technologies. Isn’t that Darwinian?

And my answer is no, it’s not at all Darwinian

or not quite Darwinian. Darwin would have said

that novel things, novel species come out of

the inheritance of small accumulated changes

so you get a new finch beak coming out from

accumulation of changes to previous finch

beaks. You don’t get a new jet engine coming out of

tiny accumulations of piston engines

Jet engines come by combining

certain things that were out there already. So

what I wound up with was saying that

yes, a great deal of biology happens by

Darwin’s accumulation of small changes. A great

deal of biological evolution works that way. But most of

technological evolution, the big leaps, happen by new combinations

of technologies doing something quite different

and quite new, according to some slightly different principle. Doesn’t that happen

in biology also? Yes, it does. It happens with

what’s called the major transitions of biology. So

you get small parts of bacterial

cells or bacteria that maybe can come together

to create a eukaryotic cell. You get simple cells

single cells coming together to make multicellular organisms

and so on. Most of the major transitions

in biology are caused by combination and then

we get Darwin again. The big steps in

technology, the jet engine, the laser printer,

those are all done by combination, and then once those are

around, once you get a jet engine that can specialize by small

changes a la Darwin. So what excited me

I’m going on a bit here, but this is very much what interests

me, is that there are two different mechanisms

to evolution. There’s Darwin’s accumulation via

mutation or recombination

and then selection, but there’s also

large combinations

and then selection, so in fact, let me repeat

that, I didn’t say it very well. So

there’s two different mechanisms in evolution, one I would call

Darwinian. The Darwinian one is

small changes accumulating, and then you get something that bifurcates

that’s new. This other mechanism that has interested me

and I’m calling combinatorial evolution

happens when quite different things are combined and then

that gives you something very different. And something like that

does happen I think in horizontal gene transfer

and has happened through the ages in the archaea

and early on and still happening, but in the

so-called higher organisms, there isn’t that much

maybe every few hundred million years you get some sort of

new sets of combinations coming together.

These are two very different mechanisms, but up until now, people

have been saying, well, technologies do evolve

from ancestral technologies, and therefore

that’s Darwinian. No, it’s not. There’s quite a lot of Darwinian evolution

in technology, but the things that really

counter new combinations -- So people in biological

evolution talk about the goal of having a predictive

theory of evolution. Do you think there could be a predictive

theory of technological evolution? No I don’t think so at all.

Yes

I think prediction here is

We have to be careful of what we say. This is a great question.

Predictive -- I think in all of -- this one’s through all

of complexity. You can’t predict where particular

cellular automaton is going to bring you

if that happens to be one of the more complicated ones.

What you can predict, though, is there

is phenomena you might see

in fact some of your own work has been very much along those lines

with the computational types of automata

you can make theories of what can

happen in general, even if you can’t say in particular

what’s going to happen. So let me express that in biological terms

We don’t know what species we’re going to have in five hundred million years

If any, right? Nor do I greatly care.

At this stage. But we don’t know what. We can’t

predict what that will be. What we can predict, though,

is that most of the mechanisms

and phenomena that we understand in biology will still be around.

The DNA mechanisms,

the protein regulations, those regulatory networks

so those will likely be around. So the rules of the game

and phenomena may not change that much

but the way that that all works out in detail

will change and technologies the same way. Yes, there

can be a theory of evolution of technology. I’m not expecting

that to change, or the mechanisms to change, but every

so often we mine into new phenomena. We didn’t expect

to get radios, say, in 1850, yet 50 years

later radio was around

so we don’t know what new phenomena will come along and be captured

and once those are captured, then there’s lots of combinations. We can’t predict

the details, but we can predict the mechanisms. Right.

Well thank you so much, Brian. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. I’m

delighted. Great questions. It’s a wonderful course.

Thank you.