Unlike what you may have been taught in primary school by your basic science teacher who probably didn't know any better, technology isn't the application of science to anything. Man-made tools which make people's lives easier — which is what technology means — can be built without a precise understanding of the principles by which they work (science).

It may be that 'technology' less strictly means 'funky tools that make lives better', because a hoe, while having at some point in the past been the foremost tool at helping make people's lives better on some front, is hardly thought of by anyone in 2021 as technology.

In the modern world, after we came to develop ways to power our modern technologies, tech has come to mean tools for doing all of the basic activities we indulge in at home, either for survival or for fun. Or for helping to improve multiple lives at different scales at work. And in our current times, it is not enough for the tools to perform mechanical tasks, they somewhat need to either be automate-able, or be able to achieve a connectedness that allows us to interact with them from far away — a regular home security system is hardly thought of as tech, but a security system that allows you to determine what descendant of Adam is at your door while you are at work at 12pm? Now, that's tech.

Technology itself isn't always derived from a science. But because kids probably need to be taught about things like germs and the importance of washing their hands and thus science as soon as possible, piggybacking on what they already understand of science in the definition of technology does make sense.

Otherwise, when the first hunter-gatherer sharpened a stick for the first time, I do not think they had a precise understanding of the density, thinness and strength of different kinds of wood and their relationships with other materials. It was probably mostly fashioned on iteration and intuition. Ian Fleming's discovery of penicillin was completely accidental, he was not following precise steps of a theoretical process in a bid to make a particular antibiotic. We coat door handles in copper because of its antimicrobial property, while having no idea exactly how it kills microbes. We just know that it does work. Technology before science happens in industry all the time. We happen upon a new interesting thing that works, and then retroactively try to understand how it works.

Every single artificially created tool however simple or complex is a technology. Ranging from basic objects like hair combs and tooth brushes, to more complex ones like the Large Hadron Collider or the James Webb Telescope. As too are soft technologies like language, money, writing and cooking (ohh yeahh. Cooking is totally an artificial tool [processes are tools too] used by humans to quash unhealthy micro-organisms in, and soften, so as to ease the digestion of, food.)

Improvements in hard technology directly aid soft technology, as seen for example in the invention of paper and similar materials aiding money and writing. But of course 'technology', by default means hard, engineered tools, which is how the word is used in this piece.

Technology has meanwhile been by far the biggest change agent throughout history. It literally has almost single-handedly consistently moved history forward. Simple hunting and gathering tools enabled our hunting-gathering ancestors to yup, hunter-gather. As did farming tools allow early farmers to farm, which gave a rise to settlements. Every single advanced civilization had to invent new technologies to enable their advancement.

The invention of cement completely changed building housing, better ammunition is probably the biggest reason the Spanish conquistadors were able to easily capture the Americas so that all of the major South American countries aside Brazil now speak Spanish. Industrialization completely changed ideas around what was possible: machines could now do serious work. Then came electricity to power all of those machines. And yeeeeah, the internet. The internet — an interconnected network of machines — has completely changed communication.

Technology, hard and soft, entirely drives history interestingly enough that every invention of new technology, it should be assumed, obsoletes existing reality.

Excerpted from Process and slightly edited for context.