Some Formal Technology

Abstract

Over roughly the past 3,000 years humans have been building up a store of formal technology. This is a non-material resource that has been an indispensable part of the powerhouse of each great civilisation. While a number of people reject this technology as somehow irrelevant, they typicallly do not realise that they have and rely on large quantities of it. The ability to do arithmetic on integers is an excelent example, previously the preserve of highly trained specialists, the process has been reduced to something that can be taught to school children. The simplicity of this material hides the thousands of years of development of concepts that now seem obvious to we who did not have to create them.

Our society would not run without arithmetic, without algebra. An mechanical engineer designing an aircraft requires a strong background in a variety of formal concepts, the engineer designing the avionics would be expected to have suitable training in electronics, and similarly, the people writing the software need to know the foundations of the understanding of their material. If any of these people do not have a proper foundation, the plane may fail to fly. Or worse, it may fly for a while. An understanding of the streamlined culmination of 3,000 years of human thought is vital to the modern software writer.