Source: Burn The Programmer! – Charlie’s Diary
RE: Arthur C Clarke’s Third Law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
I don’t have to imprecate dark and terrible forces in order to use my PS4, unless you count Sony’s latest privacy policy. My lovely new iPad is famously intuitive, not a quality one would ascribe to The Lesser Key Of Solomon. But. … That’s not so much the case for the other technology I interact with.
So there’s this class of people in the world who can do incredible things – like, say, teaching a car to drive itself. Or indeed crafting a literal Magician’s Broom to clean their towers – I mean, apartments.
And they do this by immersing themselves in obscure, difficult learning that on the face of it makes no sense to the average person.
They can cause harm to people tens of thousands of miles away using weirdly-named incantations – like “WannaCry”.
They summon and control alien entities called “AIs”. They don’t always perfectly control those entities.
And they can amass unimaginable wealth and power by using these arcane skills.
What happens next?
As I watch 2017 unfold in all its craziness, I do start wondering whether the conversation should be less about robots, and more about straight-up magic. About a world which is increasingly splitting into those who can wield magic, those who can pay the magicians, and those who just use the things magic enables.