I think Clarke's Third Law, ”Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” has emerged in full force during the last 10 years and its having a profound effect on the society. A thread:

We all carry phones that are more powerful than supercomputers not too long ago, better cameras than most film cameras most people owned etc. Internet messaging is increasingly real time. Machine learning algorithms can perform tasks that look human.

Most people have no idea who all of this works and don’t have the skills and knowledge to start breaking down the technologies to comprehend what’s going on. This is in start contrast of what we had not too long ago, when the TV was the most complex piece of tech in one’s home.

Now that people are used to using devices that feel magic - “I know this is a device but I have no idea how this works” - the ground has become fertile for an increasing amount of beliefs about tech. Us humans want to understand things and create rationales when they’re missing.

We also hear about adjacent phenomena. Facebook tracks us and it’s bad for privacy! Cyber criminals lurk in the internets and want to scam you! The less we understand the underlying mechanisms of all this, the wilder the stories can be and people buy them.

Thus, utter conviction corona tracker apps must have privacy issues! Doesn’t matter if actual experts say otherwise - how does one evaluate if someone is an expert if your evaluation criteria is mostly belief based?

This is also increasingly evident at large scale. People with no expertise make decisions on governmental IT systems and believe things they hear from sellers. Anything is possible! And because the magic is so advanced, it’s extremely expensive!

We now have magic incantations, too. “We’ll conjure the spirit of Blockchain and it will solve all our problems.” To people with deeper understanding of technology, many of these claims are ridiculous. But surely more advanced magic must exist, so these claims are true!

And this is making me feel exasperated more and more frequently. Sadly, there is no fast cure. We need a deep change in the education system to pass understanding of technology to everyone, or we’ll head straight to the dystopic Church of Technology futures now found in novels.

If you can educate people around you on tech, please do. Start from the fundamentals. Everything we see is incrementally built and none of the components are complicated if you get deep enough. It’s just hard to decompile complex systems, especially if... it’s magic.