prolog

Chapter 1: The Beginning of Curiosity

1.
Will technology evolve like living things?
2.
Why You Need to Understand Technological Evolution
3.
Why is technology important?

Chapter 2: From Idea to New Technology

1.
The Birth of the Bagless Vacuum Cleaner
2.
Scale-up: The Starting Point for the Birth of New Technologies
3.
First Question: The Premise of Scale-Up

Chapter 3: The Birth, Aging, Illness, and Death of Technology

1.
How will technology spread?
2.
Which technology will become the dominant standard?
3.
Until the replacement and extinction of technology
4.
Social change driven by general-purpose technology

Chapter 4: Technology, Like Living Things, Has Evolutionary Laws

1.
Darwin's Pigeon
2.
In search of the logic of technological evolution
3.
Law of Technological Evolution 1: Combinatorial Evolution
4.
Law of Technological Evolution 2: Adaptation
5.
Law of Technological Evolution #3: Small Bets and Adaptive Exploration
6.
Law 4 of Technological Evolution: Accumulation and Transfer of Experience
7.
Law 5 of Technological Evolution: Preadaptation and Differentiation
8.
Law of Technological Evolution 6: Symbiosis with Ecosystems

Chapter 5: Technology Changes Society, and Society Changes Technology

1.
The Future of Technology and the Imagination of the Technium
2.
What is the difference between biological evolution and technological evolution?
3.
The impact of human society on technological evolution
4.
The impact of technological evolution on human society
5.
How will artificial intelligence change the future of technology?
6.
How to Predict the Future: Backcasting

Epilogue
main

Crucial questions and insights raised by Professor Lee Jeong-dong in "Time of Accumulation"

How are innovative technologies that advance society created?
Professor Lee Jeong-dong (Department of Technology Management, Economics and Policy, Seoul National University), who first raised the issue of Korean industries depleting their potential growth rate through scale-up, caused a stir in his first talk. This time, he shares insights into the evolution of technology and the future we must move toward.
The biggest stereotype about technology is that innovation is born from creative genius.
However, Professor Lee Jeong-dong refutes this misconception and says that technology is not created by a special individual, but is created and evolved socially.
Therefore, he emphasizes that rather than waiting for creative geniuses, it is important to create a social environment and conditions in which innovative technologies can be born and evolve.
"How Technology Changes the World" explains the principles of technological evolution and the dynamic co-evolution of technology and society through various examples and vivid anecdotes.
The author's fascinating and crucial questions and their answers reveal the future of technology we will advance toward.


ㆍWhat is the difference between technology and science?
ㆍIn what kind of society do creative geniuses emerge?
ㆍDoes technology evolve like living things?
ㆍThe first question is how does it scale up?
ㆍHow does society influence the diffusion and replacement of technology?

How does technology spread?
Which technology will dominate the era?

The first step in creating a new technology is asking the 'first question'.
The first question that came to mind for industrial designer Dyson, who was tired of having to empty the vacuum cleaner's dust bag every time, was 'What if we made a vacuum cleaner without a dust bag?'
But the answer won't be easy from the start.
The first version is rough and doesn't work properly, but if you improve it little by little, a proper product is born. This process is the second stage, 'scale-up'.
All new technologies are born from a process of ‘first question’ and ‘scale-up.’
The story of a genius coming up with a brilliant idea and creating a new technology overnight is almost a myth.
No skill is perfected overnight.


In the mid-to-late 1990s, when a new technology called Internet search was just emerging, various forms of technology were proliferating.
Netscape, Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista, and others all competed with their own search technologies, but now, after 20 years, only one company, Google, has become the standard for search engines.
There are only a very small number of technologies that end up being used by everyone.
Most new technologies are used by the first 13.5% of users, called early adopters, and then disappear, a stage called the 'chasm'.
In a time of product innovation where various technologies compete, only a very small number survive to become market standards and be adopted by the public.
A technology that has become a trend is called a dominant standard.
Technologies that become dominant standards are path-dependent, so developers, users, and even social infrastructure support them, reinforcing the paradigm.


The DVORAK keyboard used in the keyboard was more efficient than the QWERTY keyboard, but it was defeated by the already established QWERTY paradigm.
Even in the early 20th century battle between electric and gasoline cars, the support of stakeholders and the vast supply chain that stretches from crude oil extraction and refining to gas stations were decisive factors in the gasoline car's victory.
However, even technologies that become dominant standards will eventually be eclipsed by other innovative technologies over time.
Users of existing technologies compete with new technologies by further improving existing technologies and maximizing their efficiency, but they are unable to overcome the flow of the times and end up leaving the market.
Instead, many of the elements that made up existing technologies do not completely disappear but leave traces as they are utilized as materials for new technologies.


Does technology evolve like living things?
In search of the laws of technological evolution

The process of technology's birth, growth, maturity, and decline is very similar to the life of a living organism.
Technology, like living things, goes through birth, aging, illness, and death, and evolves according to the laws of evolution.
Just as living organisms are composed of various combinations of 20 amino acids, technology is also created by combining existing theories and materials into new ones.
Einstein's theory of relativity required the theory of electromagnetism, Mach's principle, and the mathematical theory of curvature, and Apple created iTunes by combining the existing MP3 and Napster.
Sometimes the purpose changes.
Just as feathers initially evolved to maintain body temperature and later evolved to enable flight, Nvidia's GPUs were developed as specialized chips to quickly process graphic information in games, but are now gaining attention as core computing chips for AI.
The evolution of biology and technology also resembles progress in one step.
Evolution is the result of small bets, looking around and taking steps in the best direction for immediate gain, without any grand goal in mind.


The same goes for technology: even the scientists who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the first point-contact transistor simply wanted to further develop the vacuum tube, and could not have imagined today's computer chips containing hundreds of billions of transistors.
Both living things and technology exist within a vast ecosystem.
Just as living things coexist and share benefits with other species in a large ecosystem, Taiwan's TSMC receives chip designs from fabless companies and collaborates with various small companies in design, packaging, and wafer manufacturing to actually manufacture the chips.
In this global era, collaboration between companies with complementary technologies has become a necessity, not an option.
In this way, technology evolves, competes, and cooperates within the ecosystem of society, just like a living organism.
The laws of birth, aging, illness, death, and evolution of these technologies clearly demonstrate that technology cannot exist independently from society, but is a social product that co-evolves with it.

The Coevolution of Technology and Society, and the Future of Humanity
The future of technology is determined by humans!
“The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”

Innovative technologies like cell phones, computers, and the Internet are changing the world, but society is also influenced by technology.
This is why more manpower and capital are invested in obesity treatments than in new drugs to cure critical diseases prevalent in Africa, such as malaria.
In this way, technological evolution is not neutral, but is subject to preconceptions and biases, and is sometimes influenced by circumstances and luck.
This is where technological evolution diverges from biological evolution.
Biological evolution evolves in a direction suitable for the environment, but technology can evolve in the direction we want.
Technology evolves along the topography of human society's preferences and biases.
Technology cannot set the direction of its own evolution, but humans can set the direction toward the society they desire.
This is why human will is important in the evolution of technology.
"How Technology Changes the World" will provide the knowledge and insight we need to know about technology to create a better future, from the principles of how innovative technologies are born and evolve to how we can lead their evolution and development.

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