How does technology affect an economy's productivity?

Technology generally increases the productivity in an
economy.

To understand why this is so, let us look at what
productivity is.  Productivity is a measure of how much in the way of value the workers
in an economy can produce for each manhour worked.  If your workers create a lot of
value each hour that they work, you have high
productivity.

So let's look at agriculture to see how
technology improves productivity.  Imagine a person going along trying to harvest wheat
using only a sickle.  They have to do everything by hand and that takes a very long
time.  So for each hour the person works, he will only produce a very little bit of
harvested grain.  Now give the person a combine and he can harvest maybe 100 times more
than he could have before.  His productivity has gone up 100
times.

So technology generally increases the level of
productivity in an economy.