Workshop: The Structure of Technology

这次讲习班将致力于为科学和技术与社会和经济制度之间的相互作用建立一个综合框架。随着科学发现的产生并体现在新技术中，它们对技术架构以及周围的组织和经济产生了广泛的影响。这些影响已经通过跨领域的各种工具进行了探索。工程、经济学、管理科学、科学的科学和其他领域已经开发了不同的框架来理解抽象知识与现实世界系统中的实现相连接的方式。然而，这些研究的多学科性质，以及科学、技术和经济之间相互作用的复杂性，阻碍了建立一个综合框架的努力，而且在不同领域的平行努力很少跨越学科界限。拥有这样一个框架将有助于理解和规划科学和技术在各个层面的影响，无论是促进小设计师团队的创新，还是为一个地区发展新产业制定政策。本次研讨会将召集学者进行评估并制定研究议程，以更好地理解对预测社会结果至关重要的技术的结构特征。由于技术变革必然涉及科学发现、工程创新、商业运作和经济学之间广泛的相互作用，因此从广泛的学科领域征求意见，并努力将它们的框架综合起来，对进步至关重要。例如，各种证据表明科学知识和技术的特征如何塑造企业和地方经济。公司经常以反映物理组件之间相互作用的方式构建部门和团队。在区域一级，经济竞争力取决于人口中是否具备某一技术所需的科学和技术知识，这突出了通过培训或吸引有技能的个人获得知识的战略的重要性。技术不断变化的特点也影响着调整劳动力的努力。随着技术越来越多地利用机器人或人工智能来自动化手动和日常任务，它们重新强调了工人的认知和移情能力，预示着工作场所的新培训需求。研讨会将聚集一组具有不同专业知识的研究人员，在科学科学的保护下，开发定量方法来模拟技术结构，涉及设计组件、想法、技能、经济投入和个人之间的嵌入式关系。研讨会的一个成果将是制定一项研究议程，以促进对科学和技术变革的科学理解，并帮助预测、指导和管理其影响的广泛努力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This workshop will work toward an integrative framework for the interplay between science and technology on the one hand and social and economic systems on the other. As scientific discoveries are made and become embodied in new technologies, they have pervasive impacts on the architecture of technologies, as well as the organizations and economies around them. These impacts have been explored with a wide range of tools across fields. Engineering, economics, management science, science of science, and other fields have developed diverse frameworks to understand the ways in which abstract knowledge connects with implementations in real-world systems. However, the multi-disciplinary nature of these investigations, and the complexity of the interactions between science, technology, and the economy, have stymied efforts to build an integrative framework, and parallel efforts in different fields rarely cross disciplinary boundaries. Having such a framework would help understand and plan for the impacts of science and technology at all levels, whether promoting innovation in a small team of designers, or developing policies for a region to branch out into new industries. This workshop will convene scholars to take stock and develop a research agenda to better understand the structural characteristics of technology that matter for predicting societal outcomes. Soliciting input from a wide range of disciplines, as well as working towards a synthesis of their frameworks, is critical for progress as technology change necessarily involves wide-ranging interactions between scientific discovery, engineering innovation, business operations, and economics. For example, a variety of evidence shows how the characteristics of scientific knowledge and technology shape firms and local economies. Firms often structure their departments and teams in ways that mirror interactions between physical components. At the regional level, economic competitiveness depends on whether scientific and technical knowhow needed for a given technology is present in the population, highlighting the importance of strategies to gain knowhow through training or by attracting skilled individuals. The changing characteristics of technology also matter for efforts to adapt the workforce. As technologies increasingly leverage robotics or artificial intelligence to automate manual and routine tasks, they have placed new emphasis on worker’s cognitive and empathic abilities, portending new training needs for the workplace. The workshop will gather a set of researchers with diverse expertise under the umbrella of science of science to develop quantitative ways to model the structure of technologies, involving embedded relationships among design components, ideas, skills, economic inputs, and individuals. One outcome of the workshop will be a research agenda to advance a scientific understanding of science and technology change, and help a wide range of efforts to predict, guide, and manage its impacts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.