Theory of Technological Developments
Tuesday, March 4, 2008 | | |The stages of technological development
The pretechnological period, in which all other animal species remain today outside the avian flu and some species of primates was a non-rational period beginning Prehistory | prehistoric man.
The emergence of technology, made possible by the rational development of the faculty, has paved the way for the first stage: the tool. A tool provides a mechanical advantage to perform a physical task, and must be fed by humans or animals.
As hunter-gatherers developed tools mainly for the purchase of food. Tools such as a container, spear, arrow, plough, or hammer, which increases the physical work more effectively to achieve its objective. Later, animal-powered tools such as the cart and the horse, increasing the productivity of food production over ten times the technology hunter-gatherers. These tools enable to do things impossible to achieve with the body of one, like seeing the visual detail minute with a microscope, handling heavy objects with a basket and pulley, or carrying volumes of water in a bucket water.
The second technological step was the creation of the machine. A machine (a machine turned to be more precise) is a tool that replaces the element of physical effort, and requires the operator to control its function. Machines became widespread with the industrial revolution, even if the windmills, a type of machine, are much more.
Examples include cars, trains, computers and lights. Machines to enable man to considerably exceed the limits of their bodies. Put a machine on the farm, a tractor, increasing food productivity at least ten times more technology to plough and the horse.
The third and final stage of technological development is the controller. The controller is a machine that removes the element of human control with an automatic algorithm. Examples of machines that have this feature are digital watches, automatic telephone switches, pacemakers, and computer programs.
It is important to understand that the three steps outline the introduction of the basic types of technology, and so that all three are still widely used today. A spear, a plow, a pen and an optical microscope, are all examples of tools.
Implications theoretical
The process of technological change culminates with the capacity to perform all the material values technically feasible and desirable by the mental effort.
An economy | economic impact of the above idea is that the intellectual work, will become increasingly important in relation to a physical work. The contracts and agreements around the information will become increasingly common market. The expansion and the creation of new types of institutions working with information such as universities, libraries, patents commercial companies, etc is considered as an indication that civilization is an evolving technology.
Interestingly, underscoring the importance stressing the debate on intellectual property in conjunction with the decentralization of distribution systems such as the Internet today. When the price of distributing information to zero with more and more effective tools to disseminate information is invented. Increasing amounts of information are distributed more and more to a wider customer base time passes. With disintermediation increasingly in those markets and growing concerns over the protection of intellectual property rights, it is unclear what form the information to the markets take on the evolution of the information age .
