What the history of science reveals about the emergence of the concept of technology

When we talk about technology today, we immediately think of artificial intelligence, smartphones, and the promises—and threats—of the digital world. But there is a detail that no one expects: the very notion of "technology" is much more recent and strange than we imagine. Before the 18th century, there was not even a word to designate the general study of techniques. It was only with the Enlightenment that a "science of the arts" began to emerge, driven by the Encyclopedists' obsession with artisanal know-how. It wasn't just curiosity: it was a political project, almost revolutionary. Historian Liliane Hilaire-Pérez has shown that it was during this period that a public space was created where technology became a subject worthy of being discussed, exhibited, and shared. One of the symbols of this turning point is the birth of the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, as if technology finally deserved its own museums. But it was not until the 19th century, with the Industrial Revolution and figures like Andrew Ure, that the fascination with machines took over. Ure, a professor in Glasgow, wrote a "Philosophy of Manufacture" in 1835 in which he celebrated mechanization as a national epic. Yet even there, reflection on technology remains the business of inventors, engineers, and brilliant amateurs — not yet academics. It was not until the 20th century that technology became a central object of study, thanks to a new generation of ethnologists inspired by Marcel Mauss. And that's where André Leroi-Gourhan enters the scene. Leroi-Gourhan was not just a laboratory prehistorian: he kept notebooks, accumulated more than 7,000 bibliographic records, and wanted to understand how human tools fit into the history of life. He was not content with simply describing objects: he wanted to reintegrate human technology into the entire living world. His method, which Nathan Schlanger describes as "archaeological," started from archives and workshops and traced the threads of practices, words, and gestures. What is striking is that technology has never been self-evident: this concept was born from a series of cultural choices, struggles, debates, and a slow recognition that our tools shape our societies as much as our ideas. Today, as we worry about the promises and dangers of AI, we forget that technology has always been first and foremost a human, political, collective project – never neutral, never purely technical. No one was arguing about "technology" in the Middle Ages: it is a modern invention, which took centuries to be forged. Imagine: it was not until the 1950s that researchers like Leroi-Gourhan seriously attempted to think of technology as a total, biological, social, and philosophical fact. And even then, it was an almost clandestine exploration, on the fringes of academia. It's hard to look at a smartphone or an industrial robot in the same way when you understand that technology is first and foremost an invention of our way of looking at the world. To think that technology is self-evident is to forget that it was once a cultural battleground. If you want to remember one thing: technology didn't fall from the sky — it's an intellectual invention, the result of centuries of debate, passion, blindness, and risky bets. If you realize that technology was an invented word, and that it hides as much ideology as it does science, on Lara Notes you can indicate this with I'm In — it's your way of saying: this idea, now, is part of me. And if you tell a friend about this, or retell the history of technology over a cup of coffee, you can use Shared Offline on Lara Notes to mark this important conversation. This detour through the history of technology comes from Le Monde and has saved you 20 minutes of reading.