Technology is Magic, and Engineers are Magicians
I wish people would think more about how *magical* technology is
Have you thought about all the insane things that need to happen for you to upload your shitpost meme on twitter?
Millions of liquid crystals are coordinated via a thinking rock with electricity flowing through it, and this entire thing is synchronized by a quartz crystal oscillating at more than a million times per second.
Your meme is transported across invisible waves of light across your room into a box that captures these waves and then sends them via a network of global interconnected wires.
The information in your meme is split up, scattered, and somehow, millions of kilometers later, put together in exactly the right order, and displayed using more liquid crystals for the 5 people who look at the meme to get a casual chuckle.
Is it disappointing that we don’t always recognize how insane this is? I don’t know. I suppose it’s a normal hedonic treadmill-esque response. But I find it insane that people see technology and engineering as this boring, bare thing. Engineering is the closest thing we have to magic.
What people don’t get is that if sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, a sufficiently competent engineer is indistinguishable from a magician.
Learnable magic
Compared to other superheroes, I’m a big fan of Dr. Strange. (Only in principle. They butchered the dude on screen after the first movie).
Unlike other superheroes, he isn’t born with some magical power, or into some kind of absurdly convenient circumstances. He works his way into being a doctor, and then works his way into being a magician. And that’s what I like so much about magic as it was introduced in the MCU. It was this learnable thing with rules. It was learnable magic. With enough effort, technically anyone could do it.
I just always think that’s the exact same deal with technology. You could learn to be a rock and lightning magician. A biological building block magician. A silicon whispering magician. So what’s your pick? Do you want to connect people across vast distances? Do you want to imbue rocks with human essence? Do you want to create biological machines out of the building blocks of life?
There’s learnable rules that allow you to completely shape nature, and there’s textbooks and videos and millions of lines of websites out there to help you. And if you’re skeptical of how much you can actually do, just look around. The world you see has been shaped by magicians. And you can choose to be one.
Crazy world
Think about how crazy the world is right now. Think about how insanely shocked someone from even 300 years ago would be. Every day we walk past buildings that people live in that are taller than buildings people lived in for most of history. Diseases that would kill people are now a few day inconvenience. So many ‘magical’ objects are real- we have real looking glasses in facetime and instant communication. We have access to all of human knowledge in a few clicks. Heck, we even instantiated these little spirits that we can talk to about anything.
I think not being excited about the world is not a reflection on the world, but instead a profound lack of attention. Look around man, look around. Think about the thing you’re reading this on right now. Think about the amount of global coordination and knowledge and centuries of engineering that led to you reading this. People did that. People like you.
Anti-tech people
I’ve taken a few too many random classes in my college career. And something I’ve noticed is that the professors in non-technical classes, like philosophy or sociology, often randomly call out technologists. There’s always a random jab sometime each week about Elon Musk only knowing how to allocate money, or Jeff Bezos actually not knowing anything.
Students see tech as this cold, hard thing. “Sure I can’t write code but at least I know how to think,” I overheard a rhetoric student say once. But it strikes me as deeply ironic. The same people who want to learn about beautiful things about the world not only don’t care about tech, but have this distaste towards it.
I just wish they really thought about how deeply they could interface with reality if they even dabbled with technology or engineering of some kind. They have the ability to learn magic, the way Dr. Strange did, but they simply chose not to.
We’re building cathedrals
I hate those twitter accounts complaining that we don’t make things as beautiful as cathedrals anymore. Technology is million times more complicated, and requires the entire world to work together to create it. They are striking on something true though- we don’t treat these things with the spirituality or respect they deserve. They’re seen as merely tools for entertainment or productivity, not as semi-magical artifacts.
But I wish people would recognize how magical the world is, even without all the amazing things that we think are going to happen. I mean right now. And I wish they’d realize that they can be part of that.
They can be magicians too.