Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Technology is Magic

Arthur C. Clarke is one of my favorite writers (I would rate his book Childhood's End as one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written), and he is famous for these "three laws" as they are called:
  1. 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.
  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
As someone who still feels like the Internet is magic, I am a fan of the third law in particular:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.