Title: A New Classification of Technologies,
Abstract: This study here suggests a classification of technologies based on taxonomic
characteristics of interaction between technologies in complex systems that is
not a studied research field in economics of technical change. The proposed
taxonomy here categorizes technologies in four typologies, in a broad analogy
with the ecology: 1) technological parasitism is a relationship between two
technologies T1 and T2 in a complex system S where one technology T1 benefits
from the interaction with T2, whereas T2 has a negative side from interaction
with T1; 2) technological commensalism is a relationship between two
technologies in S where one technology benefits from the other without
affecting it; 3) technological mutualism is a relationship in which each
technology benefits from the activity of the other within complex systems; 4)
technological symbiosis is a long-term interaction between two (or more)
technologies that evolve together in complex systems. This taxonomy
systematizes the typologies of interactive technologies within complex systems
and predicts their evolutionary pathways that generate stepwise coevolutionary
processes of complex systems of technology. This study here begins the process
of generalizing, as far as possible, critical typologies of interactive
technologies that explain the long-run evolution of technology. The theoretical
framework developed here opens the black box of the interaction between
technologies that affects, with different types of technologies, the
evolutionary pathways of complex systems of technology over time and space.
Overall, then, this new theoretical framework may be useful for bringing a new
perspective to categorize the gradient of benefit to technologies from
interaction with other technologies that can be a ground work for development
of more sophisticated concepts to clarify technological and economic change in
human society.