the.com/technology
Humanity's way of outsourcing effort, then forgetting how the outsourcing works.
means The tools, techniques, and systems humans build to get things done, and the organized know-how behind making and using them.
from From Greek tekhnologia, a joining of tekhne ('art, craft, skill') and logia ('study of, systematic treatment'). So at root it just means 'the systematic treatment of craft' — talk about how things are made. The word stayed fairly bookish, used for discussion of the arts and applied sciences, until industrialization gave it far more to describe; its meaning gradually drifted from 'the study of technique' to 'the stuff technique produces' — the machines, devices, and systems themselves.
- original meaning
- meant discourse on arts, not machines
- stone tools
- count as technology, dated 2.6 million years old
- word drift
- didn't mean gadgets until the 20th century
- irony
- most users can't explain how their phone works