Clark's Third Law
Who knows how your computer works? I know I don't. I'm also pretty sure you don't. Sure, you're a geek, no doubt, who can talk big of flashing a cmos or reformatting and installing a Linux partition, or replacing your stock heatsink with some l33t water-cooling, but odds are you don't know much more than a general idea how it all works. "Ones and zeroes," you might say, but your understanding stops there. How those ones and zeroes interact to form the pretty pictures on your screen, how the electrical signals somehow magically get transported across the innards of your computer at unimaginable speeds to process video or determine how a simulated particle flies is only understandable in the very basics. Odds are, you probably don't know what all the little thingy-ma-jiggers on a circuit board do. Those few that do probably don't really know what the software engineers that make the OSes or the applications for those OSes do with all those electrical parts. And, if by some freak chance you actually have a good idea on both...well, then it's likely you have no idea at all how your car works.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Clark's Third Law has been made manifest. We may not call it as such, but magic it is nonetheless. Not sure what's gone wrong with your computer? Mysterious dll errors? You don't for a second pretend to know what's really going on; you can only offer quick fixes.
In many senses, today's technology is like religion of old. Instead of offering up sacrifices of young lambs, however, we reformat our computers, or buy new parts. We have our priests, our patron gods and saints. One day our technology may do as old religions did and wrap everything up into one monolithic monotheistic (monotechnistic?) explanation of it all.
The key difference, of course, between then and now is that we know something is behind it all. We may not know what, we may not know how, or why. But we know it's something wrought by man, something tangible, something that, given sufficient time, we might just figure it out.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Bah! I say, if a technology does not seem like magic to those not steeped in its inner workings, then it is not sufficiently advanced! We are in an age of black-box code, of thousands and thousands of interconnecting bits of technology that don't care how any of the other parts get it done, they just do it. A web browser, independent of platform. An OS capable of running on radically different machines. APIs and drivers independent of OS. How does anyone get anything done? It's certainly not through hoping things work, but it's equally certain that it's not through understanding it all. Technology has gone past the point of any one person's understanding, so one might well be tempted to say magic...except that you know that it isn't.
I'm not quite sure where I was going with this.
Ab B. Lancaster out.
1 comment:
I do believe the common example for this law is going back in time and demonstrating guns to primitive cavemen. The idea is that a separate, advanced society presents not a technology that you don't understand, but one you are incapable of understanding because you don't have any of the background knowledge. A stranger who snaps his fingers to create fire may simply have learned to rub them together fast and hard enough to create the necessary friction- but it seems like magic. The ultimate application, of course, being a technological god like in The Last Question.
The concept does not apply to us for the very reason that we do know there is a logical explanation. I am confident I could learn all the inner workings of computers. Only a radical leap from the technology I am used to would allow the Third Law to be active.
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