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That's a case that might be argued, though pinning down both what technology is and quantifying "innovations" (or inovation) is ... notoriously prickly. My working definition borrows from John Stuart Mill, who identifies technology as the study of means (to an end or goal), while science is the study of causes (how or why things happen, to which I'd add a general notion of "structured knowledge"). There are other forms of knowledge, an interesting topic itself, but I'll skip that. There's a tremendous set of ancient technologies, which can get expansive depending on your views. Everything from speech to simple machines, textiles, agriculture, medicine, metalurgy and mining, and ancient chemistry and alchemy. What changed starting, arguably, at some point between roughly 1620 (publication year of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum) and about 1800 (patent expiry on James Watt's enhancements to the Newcomen steam engine) was a change in attitudes to both science and technology (or the practical arts, as they were then called), due to numerous factors. Much of that owed to the availability of better and more abundant (at least in the short term) fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas, and the capabilities afforded by those, especially in metallurgy (greater strength, purity, specifically-tuned characteristics, and of course, abundance), as well as in the understanding of natural phenomena: optics, thermodynamics, elements, electricity, and later radioactivity, affording more capabilities. There was still a huge amount of pre-industrial, non-industrial technology, much of it originating in China and documented spectacularly in Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, a 30+ volume opus begun in the 1950s and still in development. Many studies of technology look at patent filings, which is at best a rather poor metric -- one that's in many ways a bureaucratic, commercial, and ontological artefact. Looking at the costs and derived value might be of more use. I've been looking into an ontology of technological mechanisms, for which I've generally settled on about nine factors (discussed in other comments on HN, as well as elsewhere) which I've found useful. Much of what is commonly called "technology" today falls into only a very narrow region of that. And much of what is considered economic growth can be traced very specifically to the increased energy available per capita in productive use. There's also a pronounced set of diminishing returns to increased innovation and R&D, generally. Suggesting an other-than-bottomless reservoir of potential from which to draw. |