Technology as Operator Drift: The Law of Motion of a Recovered Production Structure

How should we measure technology? Growth accounting treats it as an unexplained leftover; growth theory posits it as a stock of productivity or ideas. This paper treats technology instead as the law of motion of a recovered structure of production, an operator read from how activity moves together. Technical progress is that operator's drift between windows. The drift splits into a part the data pin down, which directions of the structure rise and fall, and a part they leave open, the operator-level Solow residual. The direction of change is identified; the cardinal number, total factor productivity, is not identified as a structural level. The paper gives the human-plus-machine agent a bounded-capacity form and places a general machine intelligence at an unreachable limit. A reproducible numerical illustration demonstrates the method and is not an empirical test.