Do We Know What Tech Is?
I'm not at all sure I do!
Is math a kind of technology?
I know it’s a stupid question but bear with me. Maybe it’s not as stupid as it seems. One way we’ve described technology is as tools for building more technology. A hammer drives nails that makes a couple pieces of wood into a home. The hammer and the nails are a sort of tech. The home could be, especially if it includes a workshop.
Making sense so far? Please don’t say no. I don’t have a comeback for that yet.
Anyway, by this definition, math probably qualifies as technology. Think about it. If you want to build a stockade to keep out saber toothed ducks (they’re very dangerous, especially in the rainy season), it helps to be able to figure out how many trees you need per foot of fence and how many feet you need to enclose the village. Math is a useful tool, right?
Don’t even think of trying to make a computer without a lot of math. Binary: 1s and 0s, is just another way of doing math.
Before the development of computers, or calculators, pencil and paper helped people do complicated math. One of the annoying things about math is that it’s almost impossible to keep much of it straight in your head. As a child in grade school, I memorized the “times tables” up to 12 times 12, just like everyone else. And when I was studying calculus I noticed that there were forms that could be memorized and applied, too (But I don’t remember ANY of them anymore). That’s the easy stuff.
Multiplying matrices is something else. The 1 x 3 and 3 x 1 grids they give us to work with in high school math class are about the limit for most of us. Actually, for me 1 x 1 is about it. But I’m old and I drink. Some other people might do slightly better. If you do worse, please see a doctor. It’s time to move to the home.
There’s a reason why I mentioned matrix multiplication. It’s an important part of AI systems. Super important. Like, Large Language Models wouldn’t be possible without it. So in that sense, math is definitely a kind of technology because it’s a building block for other technology. “But wait!” (I hear you cry) “Isn’t math all just symbols and rules and procedures? How can that be a technology?”
You’ve got a point. Isn’t technology stuff for building things? Isn’t it hammers and joists (whatever those are) and blocks-and-tackles and load-bearing-walls and huge cranes for moving stuff and, well, physical stuff like that?
To answer that, I have to answer something else. Is the Internet a technology? Or, more accurately, a whole suite of technologies that work together? The Internet uses physical cables, and computers and hard drives and routers and other such physical things, sure. But it also uses something called Internet Protocol (IP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) and a whole bunch of other protocols.
The important thing about all that is that a protocol is nothing but a bunch of rules. The rules I’ve listed here (and lots of others) tell devices on the Internet how to talk to each other. Without a common language for sending those 1s and 0s we hear so much about, there would be no way to decode them. In addition to those nifty devices that handle Internet traffic, there are a whole bunch of symbols and rules to make it work.
Which brings us to the horrible insight that communication is a technology. I don’t mean specifically English or other human languages. True, it’s easier to build technological items if you can read a specification or talk to somebody who knows how. But you have to draw the line somewhere, right? Everything can’t be technology1.
There’s probably a point to this discussion. Let’s try coming at it this way: In 1948 a brilliant guy named Claude Shannon invented information theory. In the paper where he proposed this crazy and radical idea2, Shannon introduced math for expressing the information content of any message, from a short text message to an encyclopedia.
Have I mentioned that Claude Shannon was a genius? Alan Turing (who was a real genius) often gets all the credit for inventing computers. But Claude Shannon showed us how to make them talk to each other. Securely. Information theory is used as a tool to compress messages so that they still contain all the original information (or most of it) but can’t be read without knowing how they were compressed. In other words, it’s used to understand encryption.
Claude Shannon and Alan Turing both helped give us modern technology by working out important parts of the math. BUT - I just thought of something. Maybe you’ve heard of super string theory, or just string theory as it’s usually called. String theory is math that’s intended to help us understand the way the universe works. So far, though, it’s kind of a failure at that. There are even some very smart people who have called it a dead end.
If that’s true, then we have an example of math that doesn’t help build any kind of tech. So maybe not all math is technology. Some of it, sure. But some isn’t.
That’s annoying! I started this article convinced that math is tech. And now here I am saying that maybe sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. How am I supposed to make a rule out of that? How can I tell the difference?
I guess when you think about it, there are always things that don’t fit. A hammer is tech that can be used to make other tech. A house isn’t, really. A house is more of a technological artifact than a technology. And maybe some math is like a hammer with a rubber handle. Technically it’s a tool but it’s not a very useful one. There’s a phrase that works here: It’s not “fit for purpose.”
That’s disappointing. Now I have to actually think about how technology is used and what it’s used for. I was really hoping to avoid the thinking part. Oh well.
The new poetry book I’ve been teasing is now available for purchase on Amazon! Between the Nova and the Night gathers fifty-plus original works that evoke awe, wonder, surprise and even humor. From the distant past to the far future and untold alternate realities, these poems chart a course through a cosmos that is vast, beautiful, and always surprising.
You can’t have everything. Where would you put it? -- Steven Wright