Interest
in technical change has grown explosively in the last
decade. Industrial policy, both in developed and developing
countries, increasingly includes an explicit technology
component. For this reason technological forecasts are
becoming a prerequisite for planning. Two questions
then arise: How reliable are technological forecasts?
How useful are they as a guide for development strategies?
Past experience is highly uneven. In general there would
seem to be a gap between the capacity for extrapolating
trends in technology itself and that for predicting
rates of diffusion in the productive sphere. This gap
is wider the newer the technology and becomes narrower
as the diffusion process develops, when related social
and economic factors have become manifest revealing
the selection criteria.
In
fact, the world of the technically feasible is far greater
than that of the economically profitable and that of
the socially acceptable. And the two latter sets do
not coincide either. This could mean that pure technological
forecasting would be of limited use as a guide for development
policy. A fuller exploration is required in order to
identify the economic and social forces that drive and
influence the course of technical change, as well as
the forms in which technology influences the economy
and society.
This
paper is an attempt in that direction. The first part
presents a set of categories with which to approach
the analysis of technical change.
In
the second part, a hypothesis is presented about the
constitution and diffusion of successive "techno-economic
paradigms". The crystallization of each paradigm would
produce a radical shift in the course of evolution of
the technologies of a given period, resulting in profound
structural change in the economic sphere.
The
third part examines the way in which such a process
of structural change would demand equally profound transformations
in the socio-institutional sphere.Following this general
model of analysis, it is suggested that we are at present
in a period of global technological transition, which
offers new opportunities for outlining development strategies.
Profiting from these new possibilities would require
understanding the defining features of the new techno-economic
paradigm, which, in the present case would be the system
of technologies based upon microelectronics.
Part
four, then, examines some of these features, pointing
to the specific ways in which they influence the direction
of technological evolution in products, production processes
and in the forms of organization of the firm.
Part
five explores the possible impact of the new prevailing
technological model upon other new technologies, specifically:
new energy sources, new materials and biotechnology.
The
final section is a discussion of some of the implications
of the technological transition for development strategies.
