The same came to my mind. I think there may be some elements of assembly which have to do with biological process that don’t apply to “accumulation of technological knowledge,” but I need to reread it.
Here, we introduce AT, which addresses these challenges by describing how novelty generation and selection can operate in forward-evolving processes. The framework of AT allows us to predict features of new discoveries during selection, and to quantify how much selection was necessary to produce observed objects, without having to prespecify individuals or units of selection.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9
Here, we introduce AT, which addresses these challenges by describing how novelty generation and selection can operate in forward-evolving processes. The framework of AT allows us to predict features of new discoveries during selection, and to quantify how much selection was necessary to produce observed objects, without having to prespecify individuals or units of selection.