TECHNOLOGY AND MAGIC

Through the entirety of human history, from the moment the first
stone was picked up and hurled at an attacking predator, our
lives have been shaped and focused and empowered by our
technology. Nature would have us naked and unprotected,
scrabbling in the dirt for sustenance; we prefer to be clothed
and warm, well nourished, and equipped with a variety of tools to
shape and interact with the environment around us. Initially
these tools were found objects: sticks and stones. Later, we
began to shape them for specific purposes, and then to connect
them in intricate ways. We progressed from tools -- static pieces
of specialized matter -- to machines, which are tools that can
change their shape, and convert energy from one form to another.
Matter that works, so you don't have to. Soon, we were
experimenting with abacuses, and with animated models of the
heavens known as "orreries". These led directly to mechanical
calculating machines, and eventually to designs for general-
purpose computers -- matter that thinks. This idea no longer
shocks us -- we've lived with computers for too long -- but there
is nothing natural about it.

Technology is literally the study of technique, but by the
twentieth century it had become possible to study technology
itself -- the changes and directions and underlying motivations
of the invented world, and the possibilities that might soon
arise. The literature of science fiction took note of these
observations, and, indeed, in his 1962 collection, Profiles of
the Future, writer and visionary Sir Arthur C. Clarke formalized
three "laws" of technological development:

First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states
that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he
states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Second Law: "The only way of discovering the limits of the
possible is to venture a little way past them into the
impossible."

Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."

The first two laws are largely forgotten, and the third, commonly
known as "Clarke's Law", was actually stated less succinctly in
the 1940s, based on a similar comment made by the alchemist Roger
Bacon some 700 years prior, when he wrote of crude eyeglasses and
telescopes and microscopes and described them as a "natural
magic". What Bacon observed, and Clarke formalized, is that the
ultimate aim of technology is simple wish-fulfillment.

"Magic" has been technology's partner from the very beginning --
a similar attempt to grasp and shape the forces of the world. Any
anthropologist will tell you that magic is a rational belief
based on sound principles of analogy and empiricism.
Unfortunately, it has been far less successful than its partner.
We yearn for it, write poems about it, but find no hard evidence
for it in our world. The magic we examine turns out to be
coincidence or natural processes, or outright trickery. But here
is the corollary of Clarke's Law: that trickery is also a
technology, and one that fulfills a definite human need. We use
the levers and pulleys of technology to shape our world, but what
we really want is a world that obeys our spoken commands and
reconfigures itself to our unvoiced wishes. What we really want -
- what we've always wanted -- is magic.

Adapted from: Wil McCarthy: Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs,
Quantum Mirages, and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable
Atoms. Basic Books 2003, p.1.