Towards a short taxonomy of technological progress

Here is my taxonomy, each item is a distinct and independent dimension where technological progress is possible:

• Transport matter
• Store, transport, and release energy
• Communicate
• Cooperate
• Process information
• Engineer materials
• Alter experiences
• Extend life / prevent or reverse biological harm
• Sensing / detection / metrology
• Simulate or make predictions
• Control or manage complex systems
• Identify, authenticate, verify
• Obfuscate, encrypt, hide

The legend has it that the cause of Francis Bacon's death in 1626 was that he was carrying out an experiment on whether snow could help better preserve meat:

Mr Hobbes told me¹ that the cause of his lordship’s death was trying an experiment: viz., as he was taking the air in a coach with Dr Witherborne (a Scotchman, physician to the king) towards Highgate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord’s thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment presently.

They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poor woman’s house at the bottom of Highgate Hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman exenterate [disembowel] it, and then stuffed the body with snow, and my lord did help to do it himself. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his lodgings (I suppose then at Gray’s Inn), but went to the earl of Arundel’s house at Highgate, where they put him into a good bed warmed with a pan; but it was a damp bed that had not been lain in in about a year before, which gave him such a cold that in two or three days, as I remember Mr Hobbes told me, he died of suffocation.

Bacon's ideas are often credited for their role in influencing the empirical methods that inspired the Royal Society, however he also ended his life embroiled in scandal and with many of his writings still unpublished. Responsibility for assembling his notes fell on the chaplain, William Rawley, who would likely have been one of the first people to come across a curious note by Bacon titled:

MAGNALIA NATURAE, PRAECIPUE QUOAD USUS HUMANOS

This roughly translates as:

The Great Works of Nature, In Particular Those Which Benefit Mankind

The contents of the note look like this:

The list is normally published at the end of editions of Bacon's New Atlantis (also published posthumously) - though it is not clear to me whether this was Bacon's intention or an editorial decision by Rawley. It strikes me as an early work of futurism - specifically one where a scientist is taking a progressive view of technology and speculating optimistically² about where we can hope to see progress in the future.

I don't pretend to be as influential as Bacon was, nor do I plan to end up embroiled in scandal and dying from inserting snow into a chicken on a cold night, but I can learn from his other mistakes, namely the mistake of waiting too long to share your work with others. I've had the above (incomplete) taxonomy of technological progress sitting unreviewed in a notebook for the last few years, and am publishing it below. Perhaps people would like to engage with it and tell me that items should be added, removed, or merged. I'd also love to collect other examples of people writing similar taxonomies or lists, please send any you know of my way!