Concept
Technology
Overview
Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. The word technology can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible products such as tools or machines, and intangible ones such as software. Technology plays a critical role in science, engineering, and everyday life.
Technological advancements have led to significant changes in society. The earliest known technology is the stone tool, used during prehistory, followed by the control of fire—which in turn contributed to the growth of the human brain and the development of language during the Ice Age, according to the cooking hypothesis. The invention of the wheel in the Bronze Age allowed greater travel and the creation of more complex machines. More recent technological inventions, including the printing press, telephone, and the Internet, have lowered barriers to communication and ushered in the knowledge economy.
While technology contributes to economic development and improves human prosperity, it can also have negative impacts such as pollution and resource depletion, and can cause social harms like technological unemployment resulting from automation. As a result, philosophical and political debates about the role and use of technology, the ethics of technology, and ways to mitigate its downsides are ongoing.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Their feats of scholarship during the nineteenth century were the admiration of the world. This discipline of knowledge applies beyond technology to pure science, and beyond science to general scholarship. It represents the change from amateurs to professionals. There have always been people who devoted their lives to definite regions of thought.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
Names Technology several times; opens on Technology.
The technology is readily available but changing rapidly. In this context of rapid change, several factors affect quality and cost, to which POB intends to pay particular attention, for example, the various levels of resolution that can be achieved.
Library of Congress, Workshop on Electronic Texts
States what Technology is; names Technology twice.
Gold and silver are not money by nature, but money is by nature gold and silver. In the first place, the silver or gold money crystal is not only the product of the process of circulation, but in fact its only final product. In the second place, gold and silver are ready and direct products of nature, not distinguished by any difference of form. The universal product of the social process or the social process…
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
The author is tied to Technology in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Technology
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Oswald Spengler
- Richard McKeon
- Hans Jonas
- Jean-Luc Nancy
- Gabriel Marcel
- Avital Ronell
- Lorenzo Magnani
Related ideas
- Artificial intelligence
- Genetics
- Genetic engineering
- Princeton University Press
- Internet
- Iran
- Ancient Greek
- Industrial Revolution
- Karl Marx
- World Economic Forum
- Language
- Life extension
- Middle Ages
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Prehistory
- Mediterranean Sea
- Bioethics
- University of Chicago Press
- Mesopotamia
- Atmosphere
- Nanotechnology
- Physics
- University of California Press
- Conceptual model
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Bioethics.