The writer is a systems engineer and the author of ‘Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World’

For centuries, when people wanted to describe a technology they spoke of “inventions” or “the useful arts”. In early English usage, “technology” referred to a treatise on technical subjects, not the tools themselves. Its modern usage — which covers everything from toothpicks to Teslas, and TikTok to tomahawks — gained ground in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as engineering aligned itself with scientific authority and institutional prestige.

The result is that “technology” has become a bloated umbrella, spanning too much and clarifying too little. Nor is it alone in this semantic stampede. Words like “innovation,” “smart” and “sustainability” have suffered similar dilution, sprayed across policy memos and pitch decks until their edges blur.