Samee Ur Rehman

What is technology?

January 2024

Looking back, I am surprised by how little I understood technology and how narrowly I defined it. Technology is not just the iPhone on our desks, the internet we consume, or the cars we drive. Technology instead is technique, it’s the way we do things. Working our way back through time, we notice that technology has existed for hundreds of thousands of years, limited only by the imaginative capability of our ancestors to make new tools to better leverage their environment.

Early on, our ancestors were limited by the energy their bodies generated by digesting food. This changed more than 300,000 years ago, when they discovered fire and learned to control it, using it for cooking, safety, and warmth. We must have discovered fire gradually, first by observing it via lightning and volcano eruptions. We don’t know which technique humans first used to create fire, but spinning a stick rapidly against wood is a likely first candidate. Why was the discovery of controlled fire significant? It was the first time that our ancestors had access to an energy source external to their own body. Controlled use of fire was the first and most original piece of technology.

Fast forward to 10,000 years back and we have the first evidence of crop cultivation. Humans probably learned to cultivate by experimenting with wild plants, and by noticing that seeds that had fallen would later turn into plants. Curiously, this was the first time humans directly leveraged the sun’s energy, using it to power photosynthesis, converting light from the sun into chemical energy that could power their bodies. We were no longer limited by indirect methods of consuming solar radiation via foraging.

We domesticated animals around 9 millennia ago, allowing us to lift and move heavy loads. Humans did this by selecting less aggressive animals and gradually breeding and taming them. With animal domestication, we were no longer limited by our energy to move ourselves, or to cultivate our lands.

It’s no surprise that all three of these significant technological shifts were energy-related. Humans need energy to survive and thrive. At rest, a human weighing ~70 kilograms requires approximately 80 watts of power for their body to function, which translates to 6.9 mega-joules of food energy or 1,650 kilocalories per day. Finding this energy purely by foraging typically involved traveling tens of kilometers to support a small family. By using agriculture, humans could live a relatively settled life. With the agricultural revolution, population densities increased by 2 orders of magnitude compared to foraging societies from 2-3 people per square kilometer to 150-200 people per square kilometer.

As we built more settled societies, we began to find several other new ways of doing things. Principal among these was the invention of writing about 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. To write, a stylus with a small pyramid-like shape on the writing end was made with reed - not quite a Montblanc but it got the job done. The sides of the pyramid-shaped stylus were used to make impressions into soft clay. In the beginning, the Mesopotamians would draw simple pictures to represent concepts. Over time, they evolved their writing to create characters and words. Writing allowed us to preserve knowledge and communicate across time and space. The invention of money soon followed about 3,000 years ago. Money replaced the inefficient barter system, and simplified the exchange of goods, boosting economic growth.

At this point, we started learning more about how to use materials in the earth to build stronger tools starting with combining copper and tin to make bronze, kicking off the bronze age about 5,300 years ago. Why was this significant? Stone had to be laboriously chipped and shaped. With the Bronze Age, we finally got an upgrade from the Stone Age’s chiseling workout. Melting and molding bronze was like discovering the first power tool to create precise shapes. Man, the tool-maker, could now more efficiently produce tools with more exact specifications.

Around 5,000 years ago, with the invention of sails, humans started using a new significant source of energy, wind, on top of the three I mentioned earlier: thermal energy from wood, solar energy from the sun, mechanical energy from domesticated animals, to travel further via sea. Around 3,000 years ago, the invention of the wheel expanded our ability to travel on land. And then again, about 1,500 years back we figured out that using sails (or blades) we could convert wind energy into mechanical energy to grind grain and pump water inside windmills.

We found better things to write on, about 2,000 years back, graduating from papyrus scrolls and parchments to paper, making knowledge preservation easier and cheaper. Many of the techniques humans had learnt over time came together 700 years ago, with the invention of the Printing Press. An engineering marvel of its time, it used a combination of our ability to shape metal into precise letters together with our knowledge of gears, levers and presses as well as forces and pressure to press inked words on to paper. Humans were now able to mass produce and share books and knowledge without incurring the labor of manually copying the original manuscript.

So there you go. These are some of the significant new ways of doing things, i.e. technology, we found up to about 500 years ago. And all this happened before the beginning of the scientific and industrial revolution. That’s a story for another day.

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