Setting aside The Great Irony of Technology, let’s spend just a minute talking about something I call The Return of Magic. I’ve now given talks on this subject to global technology and think tank events, regional academic conferences in Archaeology, and locally to an audience of senior scientists and astrophysicists. What one topic would be relevant to such varied audiences?
Typically, I start the talk lightly, with a short video of a hidden camera magician in a big box store demonstrating a new smart fridge to a consumer. You order on the front of it, and the food downloads “from the cloud’, appearing in the fridge seconds later. “This is the best thing I’ve ever seen; I’ve got to get one!” says the shopper. (This is despite the fact that in the second demonstration there’s the inevitable tech bug – a network error halfway through the download. The demonstrator opens the fridge to display a bunch of bananas, neatly sliced in half.)
My point – technology has become so entangled, convoluted, and advanced that none of us really understand how it all works any more. We are rewarded for specializing, and so we know our little part. But what there is to know, across so many fields, is both expanding faster than our ability to keep up, and becoming increasingly specialized and opaque to both us and the end user. All of us – even sophisticated consumers and technologists see emerging technologies and say – ‘It’s magic’!
So what?
It’s more than a cute TikTok meme or observation. Humans’ unique period of progress stems from the advances in science, technology, education, and medicine, particularly over the last few centuries. Since the Enlightenment, these realms have grown at the expense of magic – the light of knowledge drives out the dark shadows of ignorance. The archaeologists loved this part of the discussion. Myths, superstitions, folk medicine, folk wisdom, and even religion have been swept aside after open and sometimes violent confrontations between magic and the dark. Before this time, people would have laughed at the idea of perpetual human progress. As science fiction writer Cixin Liu writes,
“Medieval Europe was materially impoverished compared to the Classical Rome of a thousand years earlier, and was more intellectually repressed. In China, the lives of the people were worse during the Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties compared to earlier Han Dynasty, and the Yuan and Ming Dynasties were much worse than the earlier Tang and Song Dynasties. But after the Industrial Revolution, progress became a constant feature of society, and humanity’s faith in the future grew.”
But that arc we’ve seen since the Enlightenment, that accelerated during the Industrial Revolution and Information Age, may have stalled, and inverted. We are now seeing a “re-enchantment” of our world. How a thing works is not to be understood – it is to be accepted without question. How does your self-driving car, AI, or robotic surgical arm work? ‘Gee, we don’t know, but it sure is great; I need that!’.
There’s a downside to this re-enchantment, though. Fairy tales consistently show us that there is a cost to using magic. The genie may grant the wish you asked for, but not the one you meant to ask for. Using a magic wand may come at the expense of great pain, or it not working the way you’d expect (you turn the frog into a pen, instead of into a prince). It takes a lot of work to learn how to use magic safely and responsibly, and even then, you use it rarely and carefully, because of its cost and destructive potential.
In my discussions with technologists and scientists I emphasized that they were complicit in building these ‘magical’ things, and there were consequences and responsibilities that became apparent when we understood the magification we are collectively performing.
Our present circumstances were wonderfully foreshadowed by von Goethe’s 1797 poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. In it, the sorcerer leaves his workshop in the care of his apprentice. Tiring of his chores, and emboldened by the little he has learned so far, the apprentice casts a spell he had overheard once to have the broom go and fetch the water for him. It works! The broom animates and gets to work. But the broom spills water everywhere, and, wanting to prevent a bigger mess, it occurs to the apprentice that he doesn’t know the magic to turn it back into a normal broom. He tries some other things he has begun to learn, but only succeeds in speeding up the broom, and making the mess worse. At the last minute the sorcerer returns, stops all the misguided magic and mayhem, and admonishes: the magic should only respond to those masters who know how to use it.
In this metaphor – we are both the sorcerer and the apprentice. As masters of various domains, we’ve created the tech, and unleashed it into a world full of apprentices. Worse, we are also increasingly the apprentices, using Technology without knowing what it will do, or how to stop it, and then sending that out into the world for others to experience. But we, as the sorcerers, don’t even know the incantations to control the technology we’ve unleashed. We don’t know how to use it.
Also, while magic is respected, it is also to be feared. A growing reliance on the technology interwoven into our lives also leaves us with heightening fear and distrust of the things that are around us. It’s not just because we don’t know how they work, which scares us; it’s because we don’t know how they can be used against us by others, whether that is the people who are giving us this magic, or the bad actors who hack that tech and use it against us. Most important, in a reversal of trends that are a few centuries old, the Return of Magic is also accompanied by a fading support and faith in the foundations of civilization, with growing distrust in science, education, government, and medicine. We’re progressively conscious of the amazing things that technologies like AI can do for us, but unconsciously we’re harboring a burgeoning fear of the tech that constitutes our world.
But it doesn’t have to be so. Once we become aware of this, and the incentives of the social systems which we inhabit, we can learn to be better people, and to build and adopt better technology and social systems.
At this point many of my technology and complexity science folks jump up and argue. “Pat, that’s an increasingly complicated system, where expert knowledge is being deployed; it is not a complex one where emergent and unforeseeable consequences arise”, and/or “I know how that works!”. But these folks miss two important considerations. The first is that we can see how increasingly complicated things become complexified, in ways that the expert can’t know. We see this in mishaps like Bhopal Gas Tragedy, Toyota Camry run-away acceleration recall, Challenger explosion, and the Boeing 737 Max crashes. Events like this happened inevitably as system get more complex. Magic enters; both good and bad. Similarly, the technologist might actually understand some specific feature or technology works, in great detail, but they don’t understand the whole, but they almost always lack the expertise and incentive to really understand how it will be used, and to what effect, across all the end users and use cases. Which brings me to the second and most important factor my friends may miss – you, the developer, may know how it works, but increasingly the consumer is left to wonder, mouth open, at this new magic.
Liu, Cixin. Death’s end. Vol. 3. Macmillan, 2016.