“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” - still true?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In 1962, in his book “Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible”, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated his famous Three Laws, of which the third law is the best-known and most widely cited: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

Still true? I don’t think it is. And honestly, I’m not sure I think it was true when he wrote it. We’ve just come too far.

Of course there was a time it was true. But I think now we would just assume ‘Oh, they’ve figured out a way to make that work within the laws of physics.’ I mean, even the Star Trek transporter had TV physics behind it.

Can you think of anything that might actually happen that would cause you to believe in magic?

2

I don’t think that what Arthur C. Clarke meant by “magic” was exactly the same as your interpretation of the word.

In ancient times, we were beset by superstitions and beliefs in witchcraft and other forms of unexplained “magic”. Today, we would of course try to place rational science-based interpretations on dramatically new phenomena we were presented with by any new advanced technology. But I think what Clarke meant by “magic” is that we would still be awed (and probably frightened) by technology that we simply could not understand, even if we did not explicitly attribute it to gods or witches.

There’s any number of things that may be possible that fit these criteria. Teleportation, for example, which seems to be achievable on a quantum level, being achieved on a macroscopic scale, even teleporting sentient creatures. The creation of vast amounts of energy through nuclear fusion, and thereby perhaps being able to rearrange the various bodies of the solar system to our advantage. Interstellar travel at near light speed in self-contained habitats. Machines that are not just sentient and far more intelligent than we are, but that have their own aspirations to spirituality.

We might understand, if propelled into a distant future where these things are real, that they have a physical basis that is scientifically explainable, but on a subjective level the word “magic” would fully apply. We of the present time, in such a future, would likely be very frightened of the unknown powers that surrounded us.

3

If future people have mastered a science that we haven’t even discovered yet, I think that would fit the bill. Like say, if I made all the guns (not making this political) disappear, the only way we could wrap our heads around that is magic. When in reality they’re just a bunch of nanobots I unloaded into the Earth’s atmosphere programmed to disolve all the guns.

4

As far as most people are concerned, modern computing and telecommunications technology is “magic” insofar as their understanding of how it functions is that they make some incantation and it just works. For example, what most people understand about a smartphone is that you press a combination of buttons, swipe a certain direction, or just hold it up to your face, and it unlocks, connects to a cellular or wireless network, and you can video chat with someone around the world or look up nearly any piece of information you might imagine, and if you ask them to explain any part of the process they’ll just give you a blank look.

Even for people who understand certain parts like network protocols or programming apps, the entire end-to-end chain of operations and the underlying technology is mostly a black box that somehow produces images and connects people in distant places. Now, we don’t call it magic and people don’t believe it is driven by spirits or godly intervention. or sorcery per se, but the general understanding of the engineering, physics, and materials that go into making a smartphone work are just as much magic as the Kabbalah, and people take it on faith that it will continue to work even though they don’t have any understanding of what makes it go.

Stranger

5

I’ve used this before, but…

Too many people (including intelligent, educated ones) assume that scientists will invent magic solutions to problems, just because they want them to happen.

6

It just seems to me that you’re describing the equivalence from the other side. If we see something possibly magical and assume it must be just advanced technology, then the two are still indistinguishable.

7

I think his use of the word “indistinguishable” puts it squarely in the magic camp. He pits technology (however it’s misunderstood) against magic. It seems to me he was envisioning a time, for example, when primitive god-fearing cultures were exposed to technology they had no basis for comprehending - guns, for example that made loud explosions and fired projectiles that went too fast to see. I can full well believe the thought these things were actual magic. They believed in actual magic already. We have a strong enough understanding of science and physics that we could extrapolate an understanding.

Yes, but they do believe there is science behind it regardless of little understood it may be to them. Only in a joking sense would someone refer to the way a phone works as magic. And if that’s all it is, why make a law about it? If that’s what he meant, he might well have said, any sufficiently advanced technology will seem like magic.

8

Except technology is real, magic is not.

9

It’s more true than ever. It used to be possible to understand most of the basic technologies in our lives, at least in principle. Today, it’s hopeless. And it gets worse every day, to the point where even the developers of a technology may have no idea how it works. This is especially true for anything called AI. If you use something that you don’t understand, it might as well be magic–you wave incantations over it, hoping it does what you want, but you can’t know if that’ll actually happen or if it’ll somehow backfire.

10

But the saying is about fiction, not real life. Clarke is a science fiction writer.

11

It seems like you might be misunderstanding magic as well. Magic is an attempt at a theory of the universe. It’s a bad theory with little explanatory power, but it’s a theory nevertheless. It used to be thought that living things had a magic animating force behind them. Without evidence to the contrary, who’s to say they weren’t right? It was a falsifiable theory that turned out to be false.

Modern people have so little understanding of TVs, phones, etc. that when forced to come up with some theory of operation (because the device broke, etc.), they’ll come up with something no better than “magic”. In some cases they come up with actual “magic” in the form of anthropomorphizing some aspect of behavior. But even if not, their theory will be indistinguishable from magic in that it’s entirely divorced from reality and based largely on reasoning by analogy or some kind of folk knowledge.

12

I’d argue that the “indistinguishable” term was carefully, and wisely, selected by Clarke. He knew what he meant and he meant what he said.

IMO …

The key thing about true magic, the kind the Ancients believed in, is that the [whatever] simply occured when bidden by the wizard or invisible god. There was absolutely nothing in the experience of the witness that gave the slightest purchase on how. The how was unthinkably inaccessible, belonging to a completely different universe of experience and expectations. The wizard having just conjured up a rabbit, might was well next fly, or disappear, or create a giant chasm in the floor spewing butterflies or demons. Or both.

The mind of the observer has no purchase on the observation beyond simply having recorded what they saw like a bit of film; comprehension or analysis is over before it begins. Dead end, full stop.

That was then. What about now? If Clarke had written in 1000AD we could argue that maybe we’ve come far enough his thoughts are invalidated. He was writing in 1962. I was 5. Humanity has not come very far in that time, although some of our tech has gone aways.

If I saw a spaceship the general size & conformation of an imperial Star Destroyer simply appear overhead, that’s magic. I cannot extrapolate from current science or current engineering to how they did that. Yes, it’s a familiar trope from fiction. Fiction that never explains, except with technobabble, how it works.

I can accept, here in 2022, that some other society on some other planet does know how to do that stuff. So a scientific explanation is possible in principal. But Clarke and even age 5 me in 1962 knew that already then. The difference of 60 years changes nothing. It’s not possible to even start to explain with Earth 2022 science.

Try this: Any sufficiently advanced technology is so far advanced from your own that there is nothing about the new stuff that you can extrapolate from any of your current stuff; it’s simply a bridge too far, a blind leap into the unknown with no landmarks to help you. At which point it may as well be magic for all the ability to figure it out you (don’t) have. IOW, it’s indistinguishable from magic.

Observing any one conjuring, (e.g. the Star Destroyer) tells you bupkiss about what else they might be able to do.

13

I don’t think that’s quite true. If someone’s answer is that a wizard did it, then it invites the question of how to influence the wizard–and if he’s human, or almost human, then maybe he responds to normal human motivations. If a wizard triggered the drought, then maybe some impressive dancing or food offerings or sacrifices or something else will appease the wizard. That none of these things actually worked is beside the point; what mattered is that they had constructed a theory of goings-on and then took that to its logical conclusion.

14

IMO you’re confusing why or upstream cause for how.

If the wizard can wave his wand left & make drought, perhaps he can be induced to wave it right and make rain. I buy that totally.

How does wand-waving make drought or rain? That’s the magic.

15

For the record, the workings of my refrigerator count as magic as far as I’m concerned.

16

I suppose I don’t see a clear distinction between the two. Almost all “why” questions are really just “how” questions in the end. We don’t have any idea of “why” Maxwell’s Equations or General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics are true, but they do an excellent job in describing the universe. And if we want to change the outcome of some event, they tell us how to do so.

17

OK. maybe I misdiagnosed your point. I see a distinction between control and actuation, for lack of better terms.

The wizard and his wand (and his motivations to act) are the control. The rain or drought is the result. What’s the actuation? And how can I get some of that for me? No clue. At least in principal I could imagine hijacking the control, perhaps by influencing the wizard; I can’t, not even in principal, repurpose the actuation.

Maybe you’re running them together, maybe I’m seeing a distinction that isn’t really a difference.

18

I can see an argument in both directions. I just can’t come up with a way to reliably tell them apart. Ultimately, it’s all just a “theory of operation,” and while you can ask further questions, there’s always a point where it breaks down. I can explain how computers work in great detail… until you get to the operation of semiconductors, and it becomes “magic”. Fortunately, I almost never have to ever care about computers at this level, but on rare occasions it matters.

At any rate, if my answer is that a wizard did it, I can ask questions about the wizard’s motivations and so on. My questions break down as soon I get too deep, like how the wizard is actually influencing things. But I can’t see how that’s fundamentally different from how my own line of questioning breaks down at a certain level.

19

No, the saying is definitely about real life.

His point was about the way technology/science has altered the way that people look at the world. Until a very short time ago in human society people did believe that things beyond their understanding were created by gods or humans using magic. Witches of varying definitions exist in almost every culture.

The industrial revolution created machines that many people couldn’t understand, but most could grasp the general principles behind the steam engine. Telegraphy was almost impossible to grasp, though. Electricity sent noises down a wire that made a device click? What could that possibly mean? How many threads have we have here about relativity or quantum mechanics with similar imcomprehension?

Over time, the tsunami of inventions changed the world and most people in western societies and elsewhere as the world westernized accepted that technology could do seemingly magical things they couldn’t understand the basics of, but that they didn’t need to.

Clarke understood this change. He was making the pithy statement that the scientific age was barely two centuries old and that other civilizations could be thousands or millions of years more advanced than we were. We might have absolute convictions that - as so many in this thread have said - they must be using scientific principles we don’t have any conception of but that would be a belief as much as the gods were a belief. We would have no way of proving that science was involved, any more than James Watt would be able to prove that our ability to see and talk to one another on a screen in color in real time around the world was obviously technology and not some sort of magic.

Indistinguishable is the key word. Of course we don’t believe in magic. Of course there are logical explanations even for the unknown. Of course the world obeys the laws of physics. Yet if sufficiently advanced aliens were to arrive on Earth with abilities based on principles we couldn’t begin to comprehend, only our beliefs would make us insist those principles were scientific in nature rather than supernatural.

We often too casually assert those beliefs, mocking people who don’t share them. I’m guilty of that. Clarke’s adage remains important because it reminds us how quickly our worldview has changed in historical terms and how much future looms in front of us that we are not in any way prepared for, just like those people who resisted having the universe turn upside-down inside of a lifetime.

20

But “believing in” science isn’t actually different than belief in religion or mysticism. Science is about objective evidence and mechanism founded in physics; if you don’t understand the specific mechanisms and are not able to interpret the evidence, you are just taking someone else’s word that the ‘science’ is real, and in fact, that is the basis for most pseudoscience. As far as the depth of knowledge most people have are concerned, an iPhone is purely magical (and it even includes ‘daemons’ that run the operating system and applications).

As for why Clarke stated it as a “law” he was (as all good science fiction authors do) making a philosophical point about the limitations of human knowledge and understanding; to wit, that we have brains that are equipped to survive on the African grass plains and forage for food, and that our understanding of fundamental reality is thus limited by what we can intuit with those cognitive structures. Witness the difficulty people have with understanding quantum mechanics because ‘particles’ on that scale have characteristics of both particles and waves. There is, of course, no paradox and no problem; that is just the way things act on the quantum level, and how the mathematics we have can describe it, but we cannot intuit it any more than we can understand the existential vastness of space and time based upon on ephemeral experience and perception of our environment.

Thermodynamics is definitely magic, and while sorcerers keep trying to divine ways to violate it, only a very few wise mages have been able to properly describe it. These magisters of the arcane arts of molecular and atomic dynamics—Carnot, Clausius, Boltzmann, Maxwell, Planck, Gibbs —are spoken of in hallowed tones in the hallways and laboratories of the temples of statistical mechanics by acolytes who desperately hope that they can one day produce some conjuration that is a fraction as powerful as the Navier-Stokes equations, or even just apply that spell better to the physical world. Thermodynamics is one of the main ways to distinguish real science from pseudoscience, because if the explanation for how your free energy device or reactionless thruster defies the laws of thermodynamics, you can be assured that said technology is errant nonsense or an intentional hoax.

And it isn’t just your refrigerator; every heat engine—and thus, every useful way of producing useful electrical power or cooling aside from photovoltaic cells or thermoelectric devices—is utterly dependent upon the emergent laws of statistical mechanics, and yet I doubt one Maytag repairman or HVAC service technician in a million can even proof the second law of thermodynamics.

Stranger