I like to think in terms of social technology. By "social technologies" I mean specific arrangements of actions, rather than atoms. Examples: language, capitalism, democracy, ethics
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This brings into view that our actions are solutions to problems, and that there are hard physical constraints on what these solutions can be. Language is a solution to the problem of communicating thoughts, and does this by assigning certain thoughts to certain sounds/symbols.
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It's also a reminder that there are multiple solutions, and some might be better in different ways. English has fewer characters than Mandarin, but Mandarin takes less space to write. They're both fine solutions.
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Some solutions can be strictly better than others: English takes 3 less characters and 1 less syllable per word than Pig Latin.
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Much of the advancement of civilization is in the improvement of social, rather than physical, technologies. We talk about physical technologies because they're more visible.
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Of course, plenty of things are a combination, e.g. the internet is both the tubes and the protocols. And perhaps the most important are a combination, or are social enabled by physical.
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The process of building any physical technology is a social technology. Patents are social technology.
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