Do We Have Clarktech Yet?

[Corvus 501]

If someone from a magitech using civilization with 19th to 20ith century technology took appart almost any modern machine, do you think that they would identify it as magitech? To them, a circuit board could easily be a rune carved plait using a strange laungauge, something recognizable to anyone from a civilization of that type. That being said, does technology that would be recognized as magitech by a magic using civilization qualify that technology as Clarktech?

[Simon_Jester]

First off, I find "clarktech" to be an ugly and undignified abbreviation.

Would our technology appear indistinguishable from magic to them? Maybe. It depends. Do they understand electricity? If not, everything electrical will appear magical because it operates without any visible source of power. Do they understand radio? If not, everything wireless from a car radio to a cell phone is magical because it operates without any connection to any other source. Do they understand microchips? Probably not, and you already covered that.

Basically, any technology you don't understand and whose workings are not visible appears magical. We know car engines aren't magic because we can open them up and look at them, and the individual parts are mostly straightforward mechanical systems. We don't know that about a microwave oven, which has few moving parts- and the moving parts are the ones least important to the device's function.

[Corvus 501]

In this case, to the person observing IRL technology,magic wouldn't be the generic "we don't understand this, call it magic" type of deal, it would be somone from a culture that throughly understood its own magic system, and was familiar enough with other exotic magic systems to assume that a laptop was exotic magitech.

[Purple]

Tale your average mobile phone, your television set, your computer. Now think about them for a second. What you hold in your hand is a circuit board, so hardware. Hardware that exchanges electrical signals. And yet somehow that translates into software as complex as video games, movies, signal encoding and decoding and even server code that communicates with millions of machines at once. Does your understanding of the fact that it's just circuitry and electronics actually explain to you what is happening there? Or do you have this nagging feeling that there is something you don't understand in between the two?

Think about that. And it will answer your question.

[Corvus 501]

My point exactly.

[Simon_Jester]

To me, it's all comprehensible, but I'm a pretty firm reductionist about things with a concrete existence*, and I have a solid grounding in physics.

I know, in broad, how a metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor works, or could remember by consulting a few books I bought in the memorable past. I know, in broad, how transistors can be assembled into logic gates and how an arbitrarily complicated structure of logic gates can act as a Turing-complete computer. And I understand how a Turing-complete computer can be programmed to do, well, pretty much anything that can conceivably be reduced to numbers. And I understand how all the things my phone does can be reduced to numbers. I also understand in broad how radio waves work, so I know how my phone manages to communicate with other things.

I lack the specialization to make all these things, or to design machines that do them, or to fully grasp every last detail of their operation in real time.

But frankly, I lack the specialization to make a good screwdriver from raw materials, or to design a properly ergonomic and sturdy screwdriver, or to comprehend the interatomic forces in each individual atom of the screwdriver. None of which stops me from understanding a screwdriver.

So sure, to me, the phone has a lot more going on under the hood than a screwdriver of equal mass, but it's not intrinsically less comprehensible.

______________________

*Even while being an essentialist about things that are not purely concrete; I believe there are irreducible truths that cannot be expressed as 'atoms and bits' about the human experience, although they may well be an emergent property that would result whenever you piled up an appropriate combination of atoms and bits in any corner of the universe. This is... probably going to be hard for me to explain or justify, based on past experiences on this board. I'm willing to try but only if others are willing to actually take a little time to pause, think, and make sure they understand what I'm saying correctly. It is kind of irrelevant to the topic at hand.

[Zeropoint]

Does your understanding of the fact that it's just circuitry and electronics actually explain to you what is happening there?

Yes.

Or do you have this nagging feeling that there is something you don't understand in between the two?

No.

Think about that. And it will answer your question.

I suppose it does.

[LadyTevar]

Does your understanding of the fact that it's just circuitry and electronics actually explain to you what is happening there?

Actually? No.

Or do you have this nagging feeling that there is something you don't understand in between the two?

Definitely yes.

Think about that. And it will answer your question.

[Q99]

One thing that says a lot- A bunch of kids in Ethiopia were given digital tablets with no instruction.

Within five months, they'd learned to hack the OS and enable disabled features.

Or in other words, a bunch of kids figured out it was mechanically deterministic enough to figure out it's workings.

I think we have some stuff that'd seem magic to those in the past... for awhile. And other stuff that seems magic unless you get into figuring it out. But we're still pretty far from Clarktech.

[Lord Revan]

Tbh I think it's near if not totally impossible to reach "clarktech" within your own tech base, since basic "gut level" know how will increase as your "tech level" increases so that you'll always know just enough ebout how things work to demystify them. I mean you don't have to know the exact details of how semi-conductors work for a PC to seem non-magical.

The key here is that true clark tech will be a total black box when it comes to the inner functions. I mean I could take apart my TV and make vague guesses as what each component does and even right about to degree, for a true "clarktech" device I should go "I give up, I can't even imagine what these do!" when shown the components.

Ofc I'm assuming you're referring to the " Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." quote from Arthur C. Clarke, while a nice quote I find it rather simplistic a better version would be "any sufficiently advanced unknown technology is indistinguishable from magic". Basically once technology reaches a certain point anything we don't know how it works will seem like magic as we won't even got the slightest clue as to how it might work.

[Esquire]

There's one issue with that quote: faced with an allegely-impossible truth, a medieval human would have said 'magic/miracle/sorcery! Burn the witch!' A modern human will go 'huh, that's interesting, I wonder how it works?'

Or, science has more-or-less reached a point of Socratic self-knowledge; we know that just because we don't know something doesn't mean there's nothing to know.

[Simon_Jester]

Thing is, our approach to magic in the modern era tends to be similar, which is why people spend so much time exhaustively analyzing how magic 'works' in fantasy settings. When people told mythical/mystical stories in the early 20th century fewer people bothered with that, and nearly no one did if you go much before that.

Also... hm. I will note that it was widely rumored or believed in medieval times that all sorts of people had performed or created all sorts of wonders (talking automata, artificial human beings, flying around through the air). I wouldn't be so quick to assume medievals would automatically attack someone demonstrably showing abilities they didn't understand. Although they would be easily convinced to do so if the person with the abilities didn't establish their bona fides as, you know, "not the devil."

[slebetman]

Magnets!

You don't even need electronics to reach magi-tech. Magnets!

If you were to ask any scientist or engineer, or if you were to simply search online for how magnets work 90% of the time the explanation wouldn't actually explain anything. The usual explanation is the alignment of magnetic domains -- when they're all aligned the magnetic field of the object will align and the object becomes magnetic. THIS EXPLAINS NOTHING since it doesn't explain why the domains are magnetic. Even if we manage to explain it down to the level of electrons it still explains nothing. It merely observes that such a force exists.

Actually we do know a fairly good explanation of how magnets work. Magnetism is a quantum effect that somehow manage to get amplified and manifest in the macro world. Even so, to most people, any time something requires the invocation of quantum effects it's practically magic.

So magnets. They're magic.

-----

This brings me to something I've long thought about when it comes to Clark's 3rd law. No matter how fantastical, magical and amazing something is. No matter if we actually can't explain it. No matter if science doesn't understand it. If something is common enough people will simply use it as technology.

While the technical definition of technology is the practical application of science, the practical definition of technology doesn't care about science. The practical definition of technology is the practical application of knowledge. If we know something does something but don't really understand WHY we don't care. It will become technology and once it becomes commonplace the "magicness" of it will be forgotten.

Consider the mobile phone. Imagine for a moment that the entire smartphone industry is run by a cabal of wizards skilled enough to hide magic inside fake circuit boards in order to make millions of dollars selling their magic-tech. Apart from programmers and engineers, would anyone else even notice that it's not electronic? Any magical item that is common stops being magical.

[Elheru Aran]

Magnets *are* one way to demonstrate the idea of Clarketech, yeah. They kind of fail because they're not a technology in and of themselves, but if they *were*, then yeah, it would be pretty good.

slebetman's last paragraph reminds me of Star Wars to a degree. There's a lot of redonkulously high tech in there, by our standards. But they're so used to repulsorlifts, bacta, droids, hyperspace and so forth that it's commonplace to them. It doesn't come off as 'Clarketech' because there's no gee-whiz about it.

[Zixinus]

In certain regards, yes, to even educated medieval scholars/university staff an average smartphone is impossible to reverse engineer. They wouldn't have microscopes to see the inner circutry of the ships. They may not eve be able to replicate simple batteries or even just the glass (and I'm talking just the glass, never mind the circuitry in the touch interface). Saying that they'd cry witchcraft is silly and somewhat stereotypical, but it is likely that they'd attribute supernatural forces at work.

A Victorian engineer might be at least able to identify their existence and may be able to make some chemical analysis of some of the materials.

Within five months, they'd learned to hack the OS and enable disabled features.

Or in other words, a bunch of kids figured out it was mechanically deterministic enough to figure out it's workings.

They were able to mess with the OS, yes. Were they able to understand the nature of NOR gates and how they make adding machines and what instruction set the CPU has? No, they figured themselves around some user-level programs to prevent customization of the desk-up. For people that were barely or not at all literate that is very impressive but far from cracking the technology. Remember, the point of the user interface is to make it easy for the user to interface. Hacking gets impressive when you manage to bypass that, which you will not be able without manuals because programming has a strong arbitrary and even arcane element that you have to get trough to work.