Ancient and modern human civilizations have both benefited from and been impeded by the technological innovations, inventions and engineering applications used within societies to perform specific tasks. For societies to thrive and evolve, technological innovations have become necessary, while at the same time the culture, ideals and aspirations of human societies have shaped how those civilizations have created, benefited from, and been impeded by, technology. As technological systems are invented by humans and reflect the very essence of a population’s needs and culture, human societies/civilizations and their technology have become inseparable from one another.

No single piece of technology - even failed technology - has had zero impact on a human society. Since “necessity is the mother of invention,” all invented technology was created to meet the needs of a society and is thus innately tied to the culture and its populace’s behaviors. Once developed, whatever problem is solved by the technology then alters the behaviors and operations of the society, which may result in new problems, different economic structures, or new ways of life, which may then give way to even more technological innovations. On a macro-scale, the society may simply use the technology to survive and thrive, or it may help the society to evolve and attain higher levels of global progress by creating a greater level of societal efficiency. At the same time, on the micro-scale, technological developments may even change human behavior to the point of altering human adaptive mechanisms and thus affecting organismal evolution.