“...We were good, so we tried to do better”
And somehow, it was all familiar.
Moist listened glumly. Time travel was only a kind of magic, after all. That’s why it always went wrong.
That’s why there were postmen with real feet. That’s why the clacks was a string of expensive towers. Come to that, its why farms grew crops and fishermen trawled nets. Oh, you could do it all by magic, you certainly could. You could wave a wand and get twinkly stars and a fresh baked loaf. You could make a fish jump out of the see already cooked. And then somehow, somewhere , magic would present its bill, which was always more than you could afford.
There is the famous quote form Arthur C Clarke...“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
I suspect he thought backwards people without technology would see any technological wonder as magic rather than science.
I want to offer that most people do NOT really understand science and technology, we just accept it and feel modern by calling it “science”. When, in effect, we have merely substituted the word “science” for “magic”. The only real difference is we strip away any humility or wonder by “thinking” we understand how things work.
In this instance I am thinking of Artificial Intelligence, AI. For most people it is a magic genie we ask to do stuff we don’t know how to do, and blammo we get a result. I don’t know how to take one music style and turn it into another, but AI can do it for me quickly. I am sure there are many better examples, but that is the gist. Whether it is General AI, or LLM or something else, for most people it is the result that counts. And the results appear like magic.
In some Fantasy worlds MAGIC is a part of the world, but for some authors it isn’t just the skill of the wizard, but magic is not free. Somebody, somewhere pays a price. With AI who will “pay the price”
A second thought come to mind, with AI, automation, robots and such, doing all the work. What is the point of it all anyway? If a bot can do your job better than you, why are you even here? If a AI can write a better blog than you, why do you bother?
A third thought related to why do anything? With the supremacy of the Jack Welch model of capitalism, making things, hiring people, doing stuff, is no longer the purpose any business. It is just finance in general and shareholder value in particular. So much for the invisible hand of business fueling the world and giving purpose.
Maybe it is better this way. There is no longer the fiction that “work” brings dignity. Even with the “magic” of high tech and AI, ultimately we are thrown back on ourselves, where we have to deal with meaning/no meaning on our own.
