One of my favorite quotes is by Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Often referred to as "Clarke's Third Law," it states:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
This is a common thread that runs through many of my novels as a fictional device, but it has its non-fictional equivalent in today's society.
Anyone reading this has access to the Internet using some sort of electronic device. We all know it's not magic, of course, but how many of us really understand how it works? And if we don't understand how it works, how can we objectively see where it's leading us as a society? As Google and Apple and others pull one rabbit out of a hat after another, we begin to believe that the rabbits we can only dream about will eventually appear as well. That technology will somehow solve all of the World's problems. Problems that have been caused by advancements in technology in the first place, not by some imaginary magic trick.
The World's population is sustained by a balancing act between the ability of technology to supply food and water and the number of people being born. When one exceeds the other, either starvation results or more people survive to reproduce. Or, as Thomas Malthus observed 200 years ago:
The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.
However, there is hope in Clarke's First Law:
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.
Just because we are stretching the limits of today's technology, it doesn't mean that we can't achieve the impossible. Or as Clarke noted in his Second Law:
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Thanks to social media, the Wisdom of the Crowd says that it's only a matter of time before the next major breakthrough occurs ... that a new rabbit will be pulled from a hat that will solve everything. Something truly magical, of course, since no one really understands any of it anymore. And if no one understands it, maybe it really is magic, after all.
When the distinction between magic and technology blurs sufficiently, however, society begins to believe whatever it wants to believe and that anything is possible. Isaac Asimov wrote a corollary to Clarke's First Law:
When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.
Houdini would have been amazed if he had lived to see our technology ... none of his magic tricks could hold a candle to the everyday magic we have today.
