Slide 28
Slide 28 text
Technology, magic and skill
–Arthur C. Clarke
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C Clarke famously said: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Does technology refer to tools and machinery, or to techne? To lasers and face-recognition software, or to skill
and craft? To things, or to agency?
Well, there is a magic in skills, but there’s no magic in tools or equipment. The way a saw for example cuts is not
like magic, clever though it may be; what seems like magic is seeing someone’s skill at work, transforming
materials and the world. A computer isn’t magical, but seeing a good programmer exercise their skill is.
It doesn’t matter in which discipline the skill lies: in programming, woodwork, a martial art, building consensus,
teaching, playing an instrument - it’s the skill, the craft, the techne, that is indistinguishable from magic, if it’s
exercised by someone of sufficiently advanced skill, and not the shiny tools and the gadgets and the software
they do it with. Anyone who learns a new skill is familiar with that experience, the thrill of holding new magic and
power.
This was all missing in the teaching I was supposed to be doing, and I didn’t stay an IT teacher for very long.
And this, and that millions of pounds have been wasted buying unnecessary stuff to fail to educate children,
can be traced back to a problem about words, to our having lost or forgotten a sense of technology that implied
agency, skill, techne.
So yes, I think it does matter.