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Where we observe the predominance of one technology or one economic outcome over its competitors we should thus be cautious of any exercise that seeks the means by which the winner's innate 'superiority' came to be translated into adoption.

— W. Brian Arthur Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns and Lock-in by Historical Events (1989)

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Technology

More quotes by W. Brian Arthur

As we begin to understand complex systems, we begin to understand that we’re part of an ever-changing, interlocking, non-linear, kaleidoscopic world.

W. Brian Arthur in: Mitchell M. Waldrop (2004)

Complexity theory is really a movement of the sciences.

Increasing-returns economics has roots that go back 70 years or more, but its application to the economy as a whole is largely new.

Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (1994)

More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being.

The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (2009)

A technology that by chance gains an early lead in adoption may eventually 'corner the market' of potential adopters, with the other technologies becoming locked out.

Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns and Lock-in by Historical Events (1989)

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We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

John Gilmore

If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth, then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.

Pope Benedict XVI

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: W. Brian Arthur (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.