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The Evolution of Technology (Book)
Basalla's 1988 Cambridge University Press landmark — the single volume that proposed a Darwinian framework for technological change and provided the anti-heroic vocabulary through which the AI transition becomes historically legible.
Published in 1988 as part of the Cambridge History of Science series, The Evolution of Technology synthesized two decades of Basalla's research into a compact argument: the history of human artifacts is structurally analogous to biological evolution, operating through the mechanisms of continuity, variation, and selection. The book did not arrive with fanfare. It built its influence slowly, through the discipline of historians of technology, through science studies programs, and eventually through the broader intellectual culture that sought alternatives to heroic-inventor mythology. Its enduring contribution is the framework it established — a way of seeing that, once absorbed, makes every subsequent encounter with technological change analytically richer. It is the book that makes the AI moment legible not as a revolution but as the most recent node in a continuous lineage.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's structure reflects Basalla's methodological discipline. Rather than organizing the material chronologically or by technological domain, he organized