![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jan. 18th, 2022 12:53 pmArthur C. Clarke famously claimed in his writings about futurism that "[a]ny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Not exactly a concept that needs any introduction to anyone familiar with science fiction, of course, but I have a few quick thoughts about it based on what I've personally observed about the modern world. First though, I should introduce my reformulation of it, since it's pretty important to what I'm thinking in this space:
Any sufficiently obfuscated technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The distinction here is that whether a technology is "advanced" or not doesn't actually matter in my version. Current technology, even if it's something that should be extremely obvious in how it works, can be made to look mystical and esoteric just as long as you keep people from properly understanding it.
The thing that's led me to this is realizing that society has been convinced to just...stop thinking about how computers work. The expectation that you would know enough about your computer to independently diagnose issues and in some cases even do some programming has given way to the expectation that you'll accept that your computer "just works" and leave any higher understanding to the experts. And I mean, it's obvious that at least some of this is intentional—Apple in particular is blatantly taking advantage of the fact that their marketing and interface design has left users ignorant of how their systems work. After all, if the user thinks of the computer as a magic wand, they're much more likely to be dependent on the people who made it than if they think of it as a machine.
A lot of the terminology changes we've seen over the years feel like they're deliberately chosen to make computers feel more mysterious, too. Like how we've gone from talking about "programming" and "programs" to "coding" and "apps"—I couldn't say for sure, but if I were a big corporation I'd certainly prefer the latter terms and their suggestion of an esoteric process whose results are only understandable to a small elite instead of the former terms which imply a technique anyone could potentially learn that produces results that are clearly related to it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Clarke failed to account for the idea that the people creating technology would want to make it harder to understand than it should be, but his law ended up helping those people by convincing us that technology we don't understand is just too advanced for us. Except in reality it's not that technology we don't understand is automatically more advanced than we can deal with, but rather that it just hasn't been properly explained to us. And we should think carefully about why that would be the case.
Any sufficiently obfuscated technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The distinction here is that whether a technology is "advanced" or not doesn't actually matter in my version. Current technology, even if it's something that should be extremely obvious in how it works, can be made to look mystical and esoteric just as long as you keep people from properly understanding it.
The thing that's led me to this is realizing that society has been convinced to just...stop thinking about how computers work. The expectation that you would know enough about your computer to independently diagnose issues and in some cases even do some programming has given way to the expectation that you'll accept that your computer "just works" and leave any higher understanding to the experts. And I mean, it's obvious that at least some of this is intentional—Apple in particular is blatantly taking advantage of the fact that their marketing and interface design has left users ignorant of how their systems work. After all, if the user thinks of the computer as a magic wand, they're much more likely to be dependent on the people who made it than if they think of it as a machine.
A lot of the terminology changes we've seen over the years feel like they're deliberately chosen to make computers feel more mysterious, too. Like how we've gone from talking about "programming" and "programs" to "coding" and "apps"—I couldn't say for sure, but if I were a big corporation I'd certainly prefer the latter terms and their suggestion of an esoteric process whose results are only understandable to a small elite instead of the former terms which imply a technique anyone could potentially learn that produces results that are clearly related to it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Clarke failed to account for the idea that the people creating technology would want to make it harder to understand than it should be, but his law ended up helping those people by convincing us that technology we don't understand is just too advanced for us. Except in reality it's not that technology we don't understand is automatically more advanced than we can deal with, but rather that it just hasn't been properly explained to us. And we should think carefully about why that would be the case.
