For the last several years W. Brian Arthur has become fascinated with technology and how it evolves. More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being. Yet, until now the major questions of technology have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from — how exactly does invention work? What constitutes innovation and how is it achieved? Why are certain regions – Cambridge, England in the 1920s and Silicon Valley today – hotbeds of innovation, while others languish? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? And how do new industries and the economy itself, emerge from technologies? W. Arthur's latest book, The Nature of Technology, attempts to answer them. It argues that all technologies share certain principles; these determine the character of technology and how novel technologies come into being—and hence how innovation works.

As recent events show, we badly need to reformulate how we understand the economy. W. Brian Arthur has been involved since its early days in the science of complexity: the science of how patterns and structures self-organize, and his particular interest here has been in creating a more realistic, non-equilibrium version of economics. This type of economics assumes that the actors in the economy do not necessarily face well-defined problems or use exaggerated forms of rationality in making their decisions. And they react to the outcomes they together create. Viewed this way, we find that the economy is not in stasis, but always forming, always evolving, and always "discovering" fresh novelty. It contains pockets of indeterminacy and shows properties we associated with formal complexity.

W. Brian Arthur has spent much of his career developing a theoretical framework for economic allocation under increasing returns, in particular studying the dynamics of lock-in to one of many possible outcomes under the influence of small, random events. High technology operates under increasing returns, and to the degree modern economies are shifting toward high tech, the different economics of increasing returns alters the character of competition, business culture, and appropriate government policy in these economies.