Technology is the systematic application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals. It encompasses both tangible tools such as utensils and machines, and intangible ones like software. The term is distinct from science, which describes empirical methods of investigation.
The word has been in use since the mid-19th century, though it is often attributed to Frederick Winslow Taylor, who coined it as a replacement for “art and craft.” He used it in his 1860 book The Useful Arts, which he later retitled The Useful Sciences. It is also suggested that the name was inspired by German Technologie, which dates to at least the 1850s (Schatzberg, 1999).
It is important to remember that technology doesn’t have the same kind of atomistic character as objects. In fact, a large amount of the concept is about how technologies build themselves. Arthur, for example, explains that there is a particular ethos that must exist before technology moves forward (and that is not the same as the modern philosophy of progress).
In other words, there must be social groups willing to encourage inventors, and breeders who cultivate new ideas. Once this happens, opportunities are created. This means that basic economic relations change; companies create new markets and investments, and workers adopt different technologies and rethink their old ways of doing things. This is a recursive process, and the overall set of active technologies always increases. But a few of these avalanches of destruction may occur along the way.