Technology as a Search Problem
12th November 2026
One of my ongoing research interests is understanding the nature of technological progress: How does new technology come into the world and improve over time? What sort of factors affect it? How, in general, should we think about it? I’ve come at this question from a few different angles: posts looking at the operations and legacy of Bell Labs, posts looking at how specific technologies improved over time, posts looking at how frequent multiple invention is and how long we wait for new inventions, and so on.
My current line of thinking is that creating some new technology is best thought of as a search process. A given technology can be thought of as a point in some high-dimensional “design space” or “technology space,” which contains every possible technology: every conceivable arrangement of parts, materials, natural phenomena, and so on. The job of the would-be inventor is to navigate this space, sifting through the arrangements of elements that don’t work to find the ones that will.
This search process is made difficult by the fact that, as with any situation where you’re enumerating the possible combinations of a large number of elements, technology space is incomprehensibly vast. In “Are Technologies Inevitable?” economist Matt Clancy notes that Wikipedia listed 272 “named equations” that describe various regularities in the world, ranging from the Navier-Stokes equations (which describe the motion of fluids) to the Arrhenius equation (which describes chemical reaction rates as a function of temperature) to the Exner equation (which describes how sediment gets deposited in a river). If we use this as a (very rough) estimate as to the number of different phenomena that a technology can leverage, it implies an enormous number of possible technologies that could be created.