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The tech tree

Another attempt at understanding the configuration spaces of engineering, science, and engineered systems

2026-10-05 — 2026-10-25

quality 4.1

Wherein the Statistical Methods of Nagy Et Al. Are Scrutinized, the Limitations of Unit-Price Modeling Are Exposed, and the 2,568 Technologies Charted by Étienne Fortier-Dubois Are Weighed Against an Intractable Graph.

culture
economics
faster pussycat
institutions
innovation
mind
networks
standards
technology
when to compute

After a colleague1 recommended Nagy et al. (2013) to me as a starting point for understanding technological improvement curves, I became interested in this problem again. The paper is that greatest of things, something wrong on the internet, which is to say, it’s fine, I guess, but

1 It was either Jobst Heitzig or Gustavo Lacerda, but all I can remember is that I opened the browser tab in Berlin

  1. the stats smell funky to me, and
  2. the model is clearly deficient in the kinds of technological progress it can represent (specifically, they look at unit prices only).

To be fair to the authors, they didn’t claim that they solved the problem. Rather, by demonstrating a clearly efficient solution, they pointed the way to how we might do better.

I have an inkling that we can. I have noticed that modern theorists of technological development think more in terms of a tech tree, where branches of technological development depend on which lens and which trunk. This seems to capture more interesting features of a dependency graph than just a cost curve, but I suspect that the true graph structure of technological progress, if such a thing exists, is some less tractable shape. Can we nonetheless find a model which is helpful-ish and simple-ish, pushing at the efficient frontier of modelling such an intractable thing?

1 Incoming

2 References

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