Technology emerges as a structural tendency wherever the recursive conditions for it obtain. A subject who persists in a structure, has needs, and can understand that structure will encounter gaps between their present state and what they need. That is a problem. A subject with sufficient depth who understands the structure and encounters a problem will use that understanding to close the gap, given opportunity, materials, and time. That is technology — understood here as a convergence claim about what reflective subjects with drives do when they inhabit a structure they can understand and have what is required to act on that understanding, not as an occasional achievement.

The prediction is one of recurrence under conditions, not strict modal entailment from the proof of Chapters 1–2. Wherever subjects of the relevant depth exist in sufficient proximity to structure — and have access to materials, social transmission, and the time required to elaborate what they understand — technological elaboration will occur. This is a structural convergence consequence of what reflective subjects do when they inhabit a structure they can understand, not a cultural achievement that some civilizations reach and others miss. The specific forms technology takes are contingent tokens; the elaboration itself follows reliably under the conditions named, with the qualifier that lineages lacking opportunity, materials, or transmission may be unable to instantiate it even where the recursion-depth condition is met.

Technology therefore belongs to the necessary emergence arc [§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>) frames and [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) traces in biology. It is a threshold: the point at which a subject’s understanding turns outward and the subject begins redirecting structure rather than merely navigating it. The structural account also predicts the form externalization takes under conditions of rapid scale: where cumulative externalization advances faster than focal engagement deepens, the device-form predominates — technology delivering commodified outputs while concealing the means of production (Borgmann 1984). This is not a failure of the technology function but a predictable attractor state within it, following from the same dispersion and transmission conditions the availability prediction names.

The same account predicts an information-environment pressure from low-cost automated generation. Where producing an item becomes much cheaper than evaluating it, and where the producer gains from volume while the audience bears the costs of checking and sorting, unattended output will tend to proliferate. The prediction is not that abundant generation is intrinsically bad: play, experimentation, accessibility, and inexpensive creation can widen possibility. The failure appears where generation is detached from judgment and distributed at a scale that exports its costs of attention, verification, and correction onto others. Systems that preserve provenance, review, rate limits, and responsibility should produce less of that cost-shifting than systems optimized for volume alone.


---

← [8.11.2 What is Required](<8.11.2 What is Required.md>) | [8.11.5 What is Concluded](<8.11.5 What is Concluded.md>) →
