Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

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Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

But this is fundamentally a book about digital technology, and when we look at the full impact of computers and networks, now and in the future, we are very optimistic indeed. These tools are greatly improving our world and our lives, and will continue to do so. We are strong digital optimists, and we want to convince you to be one, too. Chapter 2. Humanity and Technology on the Second Half of the Chessboard Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Arthur C. Clarke, 1962 We used to be pretty confident that we knew the relative strengths and weaknesses of computers vis-à-vis humans. But computers have started making inroads in some unexpected areas. This fact helps us to better understand the past few turbulent years and the true impact of digital technologies on jobs.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

To us, a mobile telephone may be no more than an antisocial nuisance on trains. But to our ancestors from the nineteenth century, when trains were new, a mobile telephone would have seemed pure magic. As Arthur C. Clarke, the distinguished science fiction writer and evangelist for the limitless power of science and technology, has said, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' This has been called Clarke's Third Law, and I shall return to it. William Thomson, first Lord Kelvin, was one of the most distinguished and influential of nineteenth-century British physicists. He was a thorn in Darwin's side because he 'proved', with massive authority but, as we now know, even more massive error, that the earth was too young for evolution to have occurred.

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If a man claims to have witnessed his aunt in cross-legged levitation, or a Turk zooming over the minarets on a magic carpet, should we swallow his story on the grounds that those of our ancestors who doubted the possibility of radio turned out to be wrong? No, of course these are not sufficient grounds for believing in levitation or magic carpets. But why not? Clarke's Third Law does not work in reverse. Given that 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', it does not follow that 'Any magical claim that anybody may make at any time is indistinguishable from a technological advance that will come in the future.' Yes, there have been occasions when authoritative sceptics have come away with egg on their pontificating faces.

Fuller Memorandum by Stross, Charles

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon credits, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, dumpster diving, escalation ladder, false flag, finite state, Firefox, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, invisible hand, land reform, linear programming, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, operational security, peak oil, Plato's cave, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantum entanglement, reality distortion field, security theater, sensible shoes, side project, Sloane Ranger, telemarketer, Turing machine

(True names have power: even if it's only the power to attract the supernatural equivalent of a Make Money Fast spammer, I'd rather not put myself in their sights, thank you very much.) And I work for the Laundry. The Laundry is the British Government's secret agency for dealing with "magic." The use of scare-quotes is deliberate; as Sir Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," so "magic" is what we deal with. Note that this does not involve potions, pentacles, prayers, eldritch chanting, dressing up in robes and pointy hats, or most (but not all) of the stuff associated with the term in the public mind. No, our magic is computational. The realm of pure mathematics is very real indeed, and the . . . things . . . that cast shadows on the walls of Plato's cave can sometimes be made to listen and pay attention if you point a loaded theorem at them.

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The things we sometimes refer to as elder gods are alien intelligences, which evolved on their own terms, unimaginably far away and long ago, in zones of spacetime which aren't normally connected to our own, where the rules are different. But that doesn't mean they can't reach out and touch us. As the man put it: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Any sufficiently advanced alien intelligence is indistinguishable from God--the angry monotheistic sadist subtype. And the elder ones . . . aren't friendly. (See? I told you I'd rather be an atheist!) I push the button on the dishwasher, straighten up, and glance at the kitchen clock.

Geek Wisdom by Stephen H. Segal

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, battle of ideas, biofilm, Charles Babbage, fear of failure, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, nuclear paranoia, Saturday Night Live, Snow Crash, Vernor Vinge, W. E. B. Du Bois

When the Borg debuted on Star Trek in 1989, Doctor Who fans immediately lamented that they were an improved rip-off of Who’s Cybermen, first introduced in 1966. Both spacefaring cyborg races would ultimately be pwned by the badassery of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons (2005). “ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM MAGIC.” —CLARKE’S LAW SOMEDAY, history will look back and name science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke one of the twentieth century’s most visionary thinkers. Never mind that he invented the concept of the modern satellite communication network back in 1945 (and not just in a work of fiction; he formally proposed it in a technical paper).

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things by Daniel Kellmereit, Daniel Obodovski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Freestyle chess, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, lifelogging, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, software as a service, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, the long tail, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, web application, Y Combinator, yield management

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life.) 18 Peer-to-peer car-sharing services like Getaround, JustShareIt, and others are in operation. We don’t know if they’ll be successful, but this type of service would not be possible without M2M. 19 After this interview and just before this book was published, BodyMedia was acquired by Jawbone. Chapter 4 CORE APPLICATION DOMAINS Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~ Arthur C. Clarke In 1998, when the World Wide Web was on the rise and many companies wondered how it would affect their businesses, Nicholas Negroponte wrote in the foreword to Unleashing the Killer App:20 You can see the future best through peripheral vision.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, cosmological principle, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, unbiased observer

Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century. Imagine his response to a laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, in his Third Law: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ The miracles wrought by our technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them. The aliens of our SETI signal would be to us like gods, just as missionaries were treated as gods (and exploited the undeserved honour to the hilt) when they turned up in Stone Age cultures bearing guns, telescopes, matches, and almanacs predicting eclipses to the second.

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It seems that in every case the islanders were bowled over by the wondrous possessions of the white immigrants to their islands, including administrators, soldiers and missionaries. They were perhaps the victims of (Arthur C.) Clarke’s Third Law, which I quoted in Chapter 2: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ The islanders noticed that the white people who enjoyed these wonders never made them themselves. When articles needed repairing they were sent away, and new ones kept arriving as ‘cargo’ in ships or, later, planes. No white man was ever seen to make or repair anything, nor indeed did they do anything that could be recognized as useful work of any kind (sitting behind a desk shuffling papers was obviously some kind of religious devotion).

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

It would be arrogant and rash to claim our present knowledge as all there is to know. Today’s commonplaces, such as mobile telephones, would have seemed to previous ages pure magic. And that should be our warning. Arthur C. Clarke, distinguished novelist and evangelist for the limitless power of science, has said: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This is Clarke’s Third Law. Maybe, some day in the future, physicists will fully understand gravity, and build an anti-gravity machine. Levitating people may one day become as commonplace to our descendants as jet planes are to us. So, if someone claims to have witnessed a magic carpet zooming over the minarets, should we believe him, on the grounds that those of our ancestors who doubted the possibility of radio turned out to be wrong?

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So, if someone claims to have witnessed a magic carpet zooming over the minarets, should we believe him, on the grounds that those of our ancestors who doubted the possibility of radio turned out to be wrong? No, of course not. But why not? Clarke’s Third Law doesn’t work in reverse. Given that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, it does not follow that ‘any magical claim that anybody may make at any time is indistinguishable from a technological advance that will come some time in the future’. Yes, there have been occasions when authoritative sceptics have come away with egg on their pontificating faces.

Red November: Inside the Secret U.S.-Soviet Submarine War by W. Craig Reed

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, cable laying ship, centre right, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, fixed-gear, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, undersea cable, upwardly mobile

If the conspiracy theorists are correct, then the lessons learned from allowing the greed of John Walker to manipulate entire nations will stay buried, and the cause-and-effect results of this act remain as a black stain on the pages of history. CHAPTER THIRTEEN Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE THE SOVIETS FINALLY GAVE UP THE search for their lost K-129 and went home in May 1968, not long after the sinking of the Scorpion. The U.S. Navy let another month go by and then called in the cavalry. Captain James F. Bradley Jr., from the Office of Undersea Warfare, had already spearheaded the creation of the perfect platform to undertake the mission of finding the missing Golf II–class boat.

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Rejoicing, the fishermen called the Coast Guard and said that God had saved the sunken ship, miracles do happen, and as changed men, they had sworn off liquor and women for life, or at least the weekend. Duckett knew nothing of the affair until Mr. P. read the story in the paper the following day. When informed about the incident, Duckett smiled and quoted Arthur C. Clarke, who once said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Armed with new “magical” deep-diving cameras designed by Joe Houston, the research vessel Sea Scope steamed to the K-129 site. Sea Scope once sailed the seas as the USS Harrier (AM-366), a U.S. Navy Admirable Class Minesweeper commissioned in 1945. The Harrier received a name and designation change not long after World War II.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

“So if the average lifespan keeps expanding, that would mean the long-lived would live even longer, beyond 115 years”; A. Park, “There’s No Known Limit to How Long Humans Can Live, Scientists Say,” Time, June 28, 2017, http://time.com/4835763/how-long-can-humans-live/. 16. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” “Arthur C. Clarke,” Wikiquote, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke. ONE. VIVA PRIMORDIUM 1. D. Damer and D. Deamer, “Coupled Phases and Combinatorial Selection in Fluctuating Hydrothermal Pools: A Scenario to Guide Experimental Approaches to the Origin of Cellular Life,” Life 5, no. 1 (2015): 872–87, https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/5/1/872. 2.

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Spaight, Aircraft in War (London: Macmillan, 1914), 3. 2. This was one of what has become known as three “laws” penned by Clarke, each famous in its own right. The other two were “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible” and “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” A. C. Clarke, “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination,” in Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Orion, 1962), 14, 21, 36 3. L. Gratton and A. Scott, The 100 Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity (London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018). 4.

Inferno by Niven, Larry, Pournelle, Jerry

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

It chewed at my soul the way a ragged tooth attracts the tongue. How could we have weight and no mass? The wrong weight, and . . . Infernoland. Disneyland of the Damnable. How long had they kept me in that bottle? Clarke’s Law kept running through my head, an old axiom of science fiction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In my time it would take magic, the supernatural, to make that many people, not weightless, but massless. It wasn’t even possible in theory to extract the inertia and leave the weight. But they could do it, the Builders, the God Corporation. Why? It must have cost a lot.

Avogadro Corp by William Hertling

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, invisible hand, messenger bag, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, off-the-grid, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, standardized shipping container, tech worker, technological singularity, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

Each example justification already incorporated details gleaned from the original email, like the project name and timeline. David waited quietly while the thirty second video played. He heard some soft exclamations in the background from the group. He knew this was incredibly impressive the first time someone saw it. He smiled to himself. It was Arthur C. Clarke who said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Well, this was magic. David paused to let the video sink in before resuming. “It’s not enough to provide a general set of recommendations. Different people are motivated by different kinds of language, different styles of communication, different reasons. Let’s use another example.

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free by Cody Wilson

3D printing, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, active measures, Airbnb, airport security, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, assortative mating, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Cody Wilson, digital rights, disintermediation, DIY culture, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, Google Glasses, gun show loophole, jimmy wales, lifelogging, Mason jar, means of production, Menlo Park, Minecraft, national security letter, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, printed gun, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, Streisand effect, thinkpad, WikiLeaks, working poor

They made me jealous too. Chris’s friend looked at both of us then, his face flushed with the chill of true and unwelcome surprise. And I whispered it: “We are the heartworms of history.” * * * The eminent science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Although 3D printing may seem like magic, it came from very practical beginnings. A man named Chuck Hull first demonstrated “solid imaging” in the lab in 1984. He translated a digital design into a set of coordinates able to be translated to an ultraviolet beam aimed at a vat of liquid photopolymer.

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bluma Zeigarnik, Cal Newport, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, functional fixedness, game design, imposter syndrome, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Parkinson's law, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, side hustle, SimCity, Skype, TED Talk, twin studies, Zipcar

When you double down on what you’re already accomplished at, you’ll be surprised by how much more productive and creative you become. LIKE MAGIC As we continue to assemble a constellation of dots around a certain topic, ideas begin to build upon one another. Eventually ideas become magic. I love this quote from British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I’d take this a step further to argue that any sufficiently complex decision or idea is also indistinguishable from magic. Whenever we don’t understand the complex network of dots that contribute to some result, we ascribe it to magic or genius. I’ve had an obsession with magic tricks since I can remember, but I find figuring out the workings behind a complex illusion far more satisfying than seeing the trick itself.

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Buckminster Fuller, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, false memory syndrome, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, phenotype, Richard Feynman, the scientific method

In Holmes’s world, a suspect in a murder case who could prove that he was in New York the evening after the murder was committed in London would have a perfect alibi, because in the late nineteenth century it was impossible to be in New York and in London on the same day. Anyone who claimed otherwise would seem to be invoking the supernatural. Yet modern jet planes make it easy. The eminent science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke summed the point up as Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If a time machine were to carry us forward a century or so, we would see wonders that today we might think impossible – miracles. But it doesn’t follow that everything we might think impossible today will happen in the future. Science-fiction writers can easily imagine a time machine – or an anti-gravity machine, or a rocket that can carry us faster than light.

Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield

Adrian Hon, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, behavioural economics, Boris Johnson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer age, credit crunch, game design, invention of writing, longitudinal study, moral panic, publication bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, upwardly mobile

And yet, as the next chapter explores their own brief history represents an evolution of incredible rapidity and scope: one that has from the beginning lain at the cutting edge of the computer revolution, and that is now beginning to remould our actions everywhere from the classroom to the boardroom to the arenas of twenty-first century warfare. CHAPTER 2 Technology and magic ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ wrote the science fiction novelist Arthur C Clarke in 1973, giving the computer age one of its most memorable maxims. Had Clarke, who died in 2008, lived just a year longer, he would have been able to see a piece of technology being demonstrated at a 2009 Expo in Los Angeles that looked, to many in the audience, very close to magic indeed.

The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age by Paul J. Nahin

air gap, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, New Journalism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, thinkpad, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket

” — In a profile of Claude Shannon, Scientific American (January 1990) 5.1 DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY: RELAYS VERSUS ELECTRONICS Today’s digital circuitry is built with electronic technology that the telephone engineers of the 1930s and the pioneer computer designers of the 1940s would have thought to be magic. And I mean that literally: to quote science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”1 An example of this is the ordinary radio, which while commonplace to us (modern kids probably find AM radio just a bit boring!) would have been magic to the greatest of the Victorian scientists, including James Clerk Maxwell, himself who first wrote the equations that give life to radio.

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson

Alistair Cooke, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, British Empire, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, haute couture, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, mutually assured destruction, RAND corporation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

“This is natural,” explained the older man. “Everything has to die and has just so long to live.” Ikkyu, producing the shattered cup, said, “It was time for your cup to die.” (From www.ashidakim.com.) CHAPTER SEVEN PURPLE HEARTS AND HIGH WIRES SUMMER–WINTER 1966 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —CLARKE’S THIRD LAW With main unit production over at least for the moment, Kubrick was free to focus on two major areas of concern. One constituted the visual effects necessary to turn his film into a convincing simulacrum of our spacefaring future—exterior shots of the Aries, Orion, and Discovery spacecraft in flight, of the Moon Bus landing, and of his astronauts’ free-floating space walks—as well as adding a more varied visual pizzazz to augment the neopsychedelic Star Gate material he’d shot already in that abandoned New York brassiere factory in early 1965.

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It takes away all the magic.” His solution now—essentially an attempt to introduce magic—was an example of how some sequences of 2001 functioned almost as a rejection of the novel’s approach. (It was, however, also a filmic illustration of Clarke’s famous third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Here as elsewhere, Kubrick may at times have had a more intuitive grasp of Clarke’s principles than even the author did. For his part, however, Clarke observed in 1969 that he and Kubrick had consciously “wanted to hint at magic, things that we could in principle not understand at this level of our development.”)

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

According to a survey of web users carried out in 2005, only 19 percent of individuals expressed a lack of trust in their search engines, while more than 68 percent considered the search engines they used regularly to be fair and unbiased.17 Science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Just like photography appeared to people over 100 years ago, so too does the speed with which algorithms work make us view them as authoritative and unaffected by human fallibility. Paste a block of text into Google’s translation services and in less than a second its algorithms can transform the words into any one of 58 different languages.

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

And there’s nothing self-assembling about the way a 3-D printer works: it does all the assembling itself, with the brute force of a laser solidifying a powder or liquid resin, or melting plastic and spreading it down in a fine line. But you get the point. We can imagine something, draw it on a computer, and a machine can make it real. We can push a button and an object will appear (eventually). As Arthur C. Clarke put it, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is getting close. Four Desktop Factories 1) 3-D PRINTER: A 3-D printer and the paper printer you’ve probably already got on your desktop play similar roles. The traditional laser (or inkjet) printer is a 2-D printer: it takes pixels on a screen and turns them into dots of ink or toner on a 2-D medium, usually paper.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

Two Questions for an Extraterrestrial 1. “If you believe that our intelligent descendants”: Gott 1993, 319. 2. more than forty orders of magnitude: Sandberg, Drexler, Ord 2018, 5–6. 3. “probably extremely far away”: Sandberg, Drexler, Ord 2018, 16. 4. Clarke’s words: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is presented as Clarke’s Third Law in Profiles of the Future (1973). (Hence a self-reproducing robot can look like a monolith.) 5. Einstein was a smart guy: Gott interview, July 31, 2017. 6. “beyond which human affairs”: Ulam 1958. Pandora’s Box 1. consensus talking points shifted: John Leslie made this point.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

That seems silly and inefficient, but in another sense, it is simply amazing. Every thing you do on your computer—every YouTube video you watch, every Skype call you make, every e-mail you send—is broken down into its requisite zeros and ones and then reassembled somewhere else. As Arthur C. Clarke says, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”22 Software was created in part to offer an abstraction of “electricity–no electricity,” so that you could use a mouse or type Shift + e to get E. Computer hardware—the physical parts of the computer that you can touch—would use software to provide efficiency to human beings, so that we would be able to communicate with machines in our language rather than the electricity–no electricity of their language.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

We may be a nation of immigrants, but more than that we are the nation that invents: from refrigerators to resistors, antibiotics, jets, and cell phones, to the computer software that governs much of our lives and the genetic sequencing technology that will soon begin to do so. What would have seemed like sorcery a century ago is now regarded simply as fact. In 1961, Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Who could make such a statement today? What would magic look like to us? It has become routine to deliver babies months before they are considered alive—not to mention to keep people breathing long after they are, in any meaningful sense, dead. My grandfather died in 1962 at the age of sixty-six.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

It’s been a real magical mystery tour. Danny Way jumped over the Great Wall of China on a shattered limb; Ian Walsh paddled into a wave the size of an apartment building; Dean Potter caught hold of a climbing rope while falling at terminal velocity into the Cellar of Swallows. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Arthur C. Clarke famously told us. Hopefully one thing is now clear—flow is that advanced technology. It is also very disruptive technology—which is exactly what we need right now. In 2011, I cowrote a book with X Prize founder and Singularity University cofounder Peter Diamandis called Abundance.

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

This means the bank that ties itself into the value chain of intellisense, is the bank that will be at the heart of the next generation of retail payments. And that means being the bank that mines data to provide predictive, proactive, proximity based payments. This also means that the augmented economy is already a reality. The Augmented Economy “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke, 1917 - 2008 The augmented economy, where everything is connected and communicating and transacting non-stop, became a reality in 2013 when Google launched Google Glass. Google Glass is a pair of wifi glasses that allow you to see enhanced information about all that is around you in real-time.

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

If there are detours, it is only because the facts uncovered were either too interesting or too much fun to leave out. As an author, I’d like to believe this is the first book in which Wolfman Jack, Michael Faraday, Lord Byron, and the band Metallica appear between the same covers. 1 A World without Science “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” —Arthur C. Clarke In the early 1800s, the Danish curator and archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen hit on a novel idea for classifying prehistory artifacts. By dividing them into three categories—Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age—he was able to make some sense of his museum’s collection and shed light on civilizations long vanished.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, facts on the ground, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, out of africa, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, trolley problem

To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone’s holy text. Whatever else exists beyond the limits of science is an open question for future generations; but even if strict materialism turned out to be it, it would be enough. Arthur C. Clarke was fond of pointing out that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I don’t view the dethronement from the center of ourselves as depressing; I view it as magic. We’ve seen in this book that everything contained in the biological bags of fluid we call us is already so far beyond our intuition, beyond our capacity to think about such vast scales of interaction, beyond our introspection that this fairly qualifies as “something beyond us.”

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

These three laws are as follows: First law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Second law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If one thinks about the course of technological development over the past 200 years these tongue-in-cheek ways at looking at the world seem insightful indeed. Some of the world’s most noted scientists and engineers have not been able to anticipate the extent to which we have been able to develop new technologies and do this at ever faster rates.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

I am not talking about programming a VCR, or lifting the hood of your car in the faint hope that you can fix the engine, or trying to brew a cup of coffee from a digitally operated espresso machine. I am talking about an intimate and ongoing understanding of what’s going on beneath the surface of the systems upon which we have become so reliant in order to communicate and remain informed. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke argued that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and as cyberspace grows more and more complex the more it becomes for most people a mysterious unknown that just “works,” something we just take for granted. It is not only that we know less and less about the technical systems upon which we depend, the problem is deeper than that.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

However, “the machine age” is also a label used by some economic historians to refer to a period of rapid technological progress spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This same period is called by others the Second Industrial Revolution, which is how we’ll refer to it in later chapters. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” —Arthur C. Clarke IN THE SUMMER OF 2012, we went for a drive in a car that had no driver. During a research visit to Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, we got to ride in one of the company’s autonomous vehicles, developed as part of its Chauffeur project.

Escape from Hell by Larry Niven; Jerry Pournelle

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, out of africa, the long tail

“It’s part of your education,” she said. “Eh?” “Allen, you didn’t believe in Hell. You thought this whole place was constructed by — by what? Alien engineers? Deviants from the future?” “Either. Both. But it couldn’t be. I mean, maybe it could. Clarke’s Law says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but Sylvia, it doesn’t feel like magic! And it’s not a dream, it’s a lot too real, and —” “Education,” Sylvia said. “Shock treatment. You needed all this to convince you that it is all real.” “And you didn’t?” A tree can’t shrug, but I could hear a shrug in her voice.

Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology by Adrienne Mayor

AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, deep learning, driverless car, Elon Musk, industrial robot, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, life extension, Menlo Park, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, popular electronics, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing test

But, Blakely continues, “to call an artisan a magician may simply be hyperbolic praise of his technical skills,” especially in the case of “artifacts that seem to come alive.” In the lost-wax method of bronze casting, described below, the likeness of a person or animal can seem to appear by magic. As science-fiction futurist Arthur C. Clarke’s well-known Third Law states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” By creating an eerie imitation of a living thing, an inventive god—or human inventor—might also “seek to replicate the animation” of that thing.30 In the logic of magical thinking, the bronze object’s uncanny replication of life suggests the notion that the simulacrum might also include self-movement and agency.31 Attributing magic to metallurgy could also reflect technological mastery of natural science extrapolated to metalworking, remarks Blakely.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

Throughout the process of producing Green Swans, we had in mind a saying often attributed to Nelson Mandela, but with roots stretching back to Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”28 CHAPTER 1 MIRACLES ON DEMAND Making the Impossible Inevitable “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously concluded. In much the same way, anything that cracks a major economic, social, or environmental challenge that had previously seemed impossible to solve is likely to be loosely described as some form of “miracle.” And truth lurks in that loose use of language.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Equipped with a deeper understanding of where warfighting AI comes from and what it offers, we should be better placed to address the issues that rightly concern those campaigning to ban warbots. How intelligent is AI? The Artificial Intelligence of today would astonish a visitor from the recent past. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote in the 1970s that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That might well be the experience of someone catapulted forward in time half a century from then to today. Here we are, on the cusp of self-driving cars, where the smartphone in everyone’s pocket responds to voice commands by pulling up useful information from the ether.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

Likewise, the military funders tend to want the cooler technologies, while the mundane are less likely to get funded. One U.S. Army researcher working on nonlethal weapons systems complains, “You have to beg for money for things like beanbags or acoustics. But say it’s for a laser or a lightsaber and the money is no problem.” THE LENS OF THE LOOKING GLASS “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” famously argued English physicist and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. Indeed, when the warriors of the Hehe tribe in Tanzania surrounded a single German colonist in 1891, they seemingly had little to fear. But he had a magic box that killed almost a thousand spear-armed warriors by spitting out death faster than they ever imagined possible, the machine gun.

…

The captured emperor then offered the visitors a ransom to set him free, enough gold to fill a room twenty-two feet long, seventeen feet wide, and eight feet high. The visitors agreed. But after these strange, fearsome men had their gold, they reneged. They executed Atahuallpa and took over his empire. As the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame once observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Nowhere is this more true than in war. Time and again, warring sides have used new technologies not only to kill more efficiently than their foe, but also to dazzle them into submission. The case of Atahuallpa, unlucky enough to become emperor just before the arrival of Francisco Pizarro and his tiny band of Spanish conquistadors, is a powerful example of just how shocking and powerful new weapons of war can be.

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen Cave

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, back-to-the-land, clean water, double helix, George Santayana, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, life extension, planetary scale, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, stem cell, technoutopianism, the scientific method

The battery of technologies that Xu Fu is credited with introducing to a still stone-age Japan genuinely would have contributed to increased lifespans for the island’s inhabitants. That, indeed, is their point, which is why it is entirely natural that the legend then seamlessly goes on to tell how Xu Fu’s genius culminated with his finding the elixir of life. The writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” For a person wondering at the magical-seeming achievements of civilization, from the plow to heart bypass surgery, an elixir of life can seem an entirely plausible next step. This is as true now as it was in ancient Japan. Just as it was also already true in ancient China when the First Emperor came to power.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, drone strike, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, forward guidance, Freestyle chess, fundamental attribution error, germ theory of disease, hindsight bias, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index fund, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, operational security, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, tail risk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Reality is seen and foreseen like never before. And most of us—let’s be honest with ourselves—don’t have the dimmest idea how data scientists do what they do. We find it a little intimidating, if not dazzling. As the scientist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” As an assistant professor of mathematics at Cornell, Lionel Levine is one of the magicians. His résumé lists an AB in math from Harvard, a PhD in math from Berkeley, a string of prestigious grants and fellowships, and a longer string of papers with occult titles like “Scaling Limits for Internal Aggregation Models with Multiple Sources.”

Possiplex by Ted Nelson

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Computer Lib, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Murray Gell-Mann, nonsequential writing, pattern recognition, post-work, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vannevar Bush, Zimmermann PGP

I don't remember what he said, but it was very complimentary, about hypertext and all. I was speechless. It is the only time ever remember being unable to say anything, pressed against the wall by his charisma wavefront. I could only nod and smile and thank him. AI Bullshit (N): “Intelligent Interfaces” Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke Clarke’s dictum, above, is one of the most unfortunate things ever said, suggesting that nobody will understand anything any more, separating the elite who control technology from the suckers who use it—undermining the democratic principle of popular understanding.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

The first generation born after the Fall would find the internal mechanisms of a modern phone absolutely inscrutable, the pathways of its microchip circuits invisibly small to the human eye and their purpose utterly mysterious. The sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke said in 1961 that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. In the aftermath of the Fall, the rub is that this miraculous technology would have belonged not to some star-faring alien species, but to people just a generation in our own past. Even quotidian artifacts of our civilization that aren’t particularly high-tech still require a diversity of raw materials that must be mined or otherwise gathered, processed in specialized plants, and assembled in a manufacturing facility.

The Paths Between Worlds: This Alien Earth Book One by Paul Antony Jones

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, machine readable, megastructure, period drama

It reminded me of one of those old horror movies where the vampires or zombies come back to life at nightfall. But these weren’t the undead, they were the almost-dead, saved by a technology so advanced I couldn’t even begin to comprehend the intelligence behind it. How did that quote by Arthur C. Clarke go? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” I whispered the words reverently. “Magic indeed,” Bull said. “I wonder, if we had possessed this technology in my time whether we would have continued to fight?” Edward opined. “Or whether we would have ever started those damnable wars in the first place. It seems to me that only infinite enlightenment could have created such a technology as this.”

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum by Camila Russo

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, altcoin, always be closing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asian financial crisis, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Cody Wilson, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, East Village, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hacker house, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, mobile money, new economy, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Turing complete, Two Sigma, Uber for X, Vitalik Buterin

Dedication “Before anything else, you are a writer,” my mother likes to say. This is for her. Epigraph Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Arthur C. Clarke Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph A Note to My Readers Part I: Groundwork 1: Mooning 2: Cypherpunks’ Fever Dream 3: The Magazine 4: The Rabbit Hole 5: The Swiss Knife Part II: Prelaunch 6: The White Paper 7: The First Responders 8: The Miami House 9: The Announcement 10: The Town of Zug 11: The Spaceship 12: The White-Shoe Lawyers 13: The Red Wedding 14: The (Non)Investment 15: The Ether Sale Part III: Launch 16: Takeoff 17: The Shrinking Runway 18: The First Dapps 19: The Magic Lock Part IV: Lunar Orbit 20: The DAO Wars 21: The Fork 22: The Shanghai Attacks Part V: Near-Landing 23: The Burning Wick 24: Accidentally Ether Rich 25: The New IPO 26: The Friendly Ghost 27: The Boom 28: Futures and Cats Part VI: Back to Earth 29: The Crash 30: The Party Acknowledgments Notes About the Author Copyright About the Publisher A Note to My Readers I don’t consider myself a computer geek.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Richmond, VA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011). See also Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (London: W. W. Norton, 2014). Chapter 2 The Augmented Age “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law from Profiles of the Future (revised edition, 1973) We are closer now to 2030 than we are to the start of the new millennium (2000). The technologies we are exploring today, such as artificial intelligence, gene editing, nanoscale manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, robots, wearables and embedded computing, are radically going to redefine the next age of humanity.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet by Justin Peters

4chan, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Alan Greenspan, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bayesian statistics, Brewster Kahle, buy low sell high, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, Free Software Foundation, global village, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, machine readable, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Open Library, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, social web, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

This dream is usually abandoned with age, deferred into idle bar-stool radicalism and the occasional protest vote. The world has many problems, and even the most effective individual would be unlikely to solve all of them absent divine intervention or black magic. The novelist Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Third Law states, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is also true that any sufficiently advanced technology encourages magical thinking. New technologies are indistinguishable from magic wands, imbued with great and implausible powers that can transcend societal barriers and the laws of thermodynamics. Silicon Valley is rife with examples of aspiring messiahs touting the world-historical potential of their products.

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

At the turn of the twentieth century, motorized cars were a novelty—they were finicky, dangerous, and there was a reasonable argument that the horse was a better piece of hardware. But within a decade or two this had changed. After World War II, the level of industrial specialization required to integrate ever more advanced automotive systems grew exponentially. The British futurist Arthur C. Clarke once famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the complexity of an automobile had far outstripped the understanding of the common man. Making an automobile that was strong, safe, durable, clean, and efficient enough to be globally competitive required legions of engineers, physicists, specialists in areas like fluid dynamics, harmonics, kinematics, materials science, and an increasingly large number of electrical engineers and computer scientists.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Afterward, no one remembered the talk, which was lost in the brilliance of Engelbart’s NLS creation. Indeed, it was the moment the tables turned, and computer science, which had until then been primarily concerned with the esoteric problem of automating human intelligence, would never be the same. Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” For many people who saw Doug Engelbart bombing through cyberspace and dealing lightning with both hands in December 1968, that was certainly true. But one young programmer who watched from the audience had a stronger reaction. Charles Irby had been a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he had worked for Glen Culler, a math professor who independently designed interactive computers for mathematical applications before anyone knew what the word “interactive” meant in that context.

Pandora's Brain by Calum Chace

AI winter, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Extropian, friendly AI, hive mind, lateral thinking, machine translation, mega-rich, Nick Bostrom, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, theory of mind, Turing test, Wall-E

‘And competition with the AI is just one of the scenarios which don’t work out well for humanity. Even if the AI is well-disposed towards us it could inadvertently enfeeble us simply by demonstrating vividly that we have become an inferior species. Science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke’s third law famously states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. A later variant of that law says that any sufficiently advanced benevolence may be indistinguishable from malevolence.’ As Professor Montaubon drew breath, Ross took the opportunity to introduce a change of voice. ‘How about you, Professor Christensen? Are you any more optimistic?’

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

J. Sejnowski, “Rotating Waves during Human Sleep Spindles Organize Global Patterns of Activity during the Night,” eLife 5 (2016): e17267. Supported by the Office of Naval Research. 13. In what came to be known as “Clarke’s third law,” Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Chapter 16 1. This chapter was adapted from T. J. Sejnowski, “Consciousness,” Daedalus 144, no. 1 (2015): 123–132. See also Francis H. C. Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Bob Hicks, “Kindra Crick’s Mad Pursuit,” Oregon ArtWatch, December 3, 2015. http://www.orartswatch.org/ kindra-cricks-mad-pursuit/.

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland

agricultural Revolution, Alexander Shulgin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Burning Man, classic study, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, experimental economics, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, hive mind, invention of agriculture, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, lateral thinking, lockdown, lone genius, meta-analysis, microdosing, Picturephone, placebo effect, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, search costs, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Zenefits

When they hold your hand, look into your eyes, and ask you vague then increasingly precise questions, they are taking advantage of subtle expressions and tiny reactions to hone in on the fact that you recently suffered a loss in your family and are desperately unhappy at work. This seems like magic to ordinary people, but only to the same extent that commonplace human mind-reading would seem to a chimpanzee. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to the uninitiated. The same is true of extreme traits exaggerated by runaway evolutionary arms races. Crucially for our story about alcohol, cultures are not disinterested bystanders in this contest between cheaters and cheater detectors. Cultures benefit when the individuals in them are able to solve Prisoner’s Dilemmas and other cooperation challenges, and so have a vested interest in putting their thumb on the scale to favor the cheater detectors.

Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age by Robert Stone, Alan Andres

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, feminist movement, Gene Kranz, General Motors Futurama, invention of the telephone, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, out of africa, overview effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration

“I prided myself” ACC, Astounding Days (London: Gollancz, 1989), p. 125. When the project was completed ACC, Astounding, p. 152. “When a distinguished” Clarke’s other two laws being: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible” (Clarke’s Second Law, 1962), and “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (Clarke’s Third Law, 1973). News about the society’s rocket Tony Reichhardt, “H.M.S. Moon Rocket,” Air & Space (March 1997). During the flurry McAleer, Odyssey, p. 35. Sitting on a veranda Fritz Lang, “Sci-Fi Film-maker’s Debt to Rocket Man Willy Ley,” Los Angeles Times (July 27, 1969).

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

There will be a huge business in manufacturing 3D printers at least! Well, that is, until we can print a new 3D printer using your old one . . . A great quote to illustrate the concept of the realisation of such technological advancement is one from the late science fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” An iPad would certainly have appeared magical to someone living in the 18th century. While 25 years is a long way away, let’s think about the devices we’ll be using in 2016, just four years away, and how those devices will enable the banking experience. The technology of 2016 should inform the type of services and technology utilisation required for banking in four years’ time.

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

You don’t even have to go to the trouble of taking out your wallet when your kid grabs a stuffed Olaf and begs for just this one thing, please. You just wave your MagicBand. Tom Staggs couches Disney’s goals for the MagicBand system in an old saw from Arthur C. Clarke. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” he told me. “That’s how we think of it. If we can get out of the way, our guests can create more memories.”9 At the time, Staggs was the chief operating officer of the entire $168 billion Walt Disney Company empire, a parks veteran in line to become Disney’s next CEO.

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

We also understand that some obsolescence is good: replacing cars for models with more fuel-efficient engines or catalytic converters, for example, or plastic bottles that contain fewer toxic chemicals. Similarly, we know the rapid churn of smart devices in the last decade-plus has largely been driven not by faulty products, but by the relentless pace of technological progress. (When Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 1962 that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ he might have been describing the iPhone.) Even so, the electronics industry in recent years has faced allegations that a modern version of planned obsolescence is contributing to our rising tide of e-waste. The assertion is less one of fact than of feeling, but nonetheless has slowly but steadily accumulated, along with our rubbish.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

Contents Introduction CHAPTER 1 The Way of the Wind CHAPTER 2 How the Grid Got Its Wires CHAPTER 3 The Consolidation of Power CHAPTER 4 The Cardigan Path CHAPTER 5 Things Fall Apart CHAPTER 6 Two Birds, One Stone CHAPTER 7 A Tale of Two Storms CHAPTER 8 In Search of the Holy Grail CHAPTER 9 American Zeitgeist Afterword: Contemplating Death in the Afternoon Acknowledgments Notes Index A Note on the Author Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE Right now there’s three power companies in New York City: there is ConEd in Manhattan, there is the Brooklyn power company Brooklyn Union Gas up in Brooklyn, and there is a windmill here on 519 East Eleventh Street. —INTERVIEW FROM THE 1978 FILM VIVA LOISAIDA Introduction Energy is a hot-button issue these days.

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

It’s hard to decide how good your minimum product should be. On the one hand, time is precious, and you need to cut things ruthlessly. On the other hand, you want users to have an “aha!” moment, that sense of having discovered something important and memorable worth solving. You need to keep the magic. Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1961 Gehm’s Corrollary: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. —Barry Gehm, ANALOG, 1991 Deciding What Goes into the MVP Take all of your solution interviews, quantitative analysis, and “hacks,” and decide what feature set to launch for your MVP.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Which explains why Facebook has invested so heavily in Internet.org and its Connectivity Lab, which are tasked with bringing the Internet to the developing world, whether by balloon, satellite, drone, or laser—it wants more people on the Internet so it can add more Facebook users and maintain the rate at which its value grows. This is true of the Hype Machine in general. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE In August 2016, Hillary Clinton found herself in a jail cell in the back of a Ford F-350 pickup truck in West Palm Beach, Florida. Although she didn’t know it at the time, it was the Russians who had put her there. Replicating their information warfare strategy from Crimea in 2014, they were now pointing the Hype Machine at the United States in the hope of disrupting the 2016 presidential election.

The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, coherent worldview, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Johannes Kepler, Occam's razor, phenotype, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Turing machine

You would know that, even though the universe seemed to have a certain layout and obey certain laws, there must be a wider universe outside it, obeying different laws of physics. And you could even guess some of the ways in which these wider laws would have to differ from the chessboard laws. Arthur C. Clarke once remarked that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. This is true, but slightly misleading. It is stated from the point of view of a pre-scientific thinker, which is the wrong way round. The fact is that to anyone who understands what virtual reality is, even genuine magic would be indistinguishable from technology, for there is no room for magic in a comprehensible reality.

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

For most people, many of the most significant and powerful processes and devices around us – from smartphones and laptops to financial systems and political protocols – are effectively black boxes, amenable only to those with specialized knowledge and privileged access: a situation which produces radical inequalities of power and agency. It’s no wonder that the most repeated of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws is the third: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.25 Magical terminology is also buried in the machines themselves. Helper programmes designed to assist users unfamiliar with new software bear the name ‘wizard’, while a common name for the sub-routines that quietly monitor and run many of the background processes in computer systems is a ‘daemon’.

AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Classification: LCC Q335 .L423 2021 (print) | LCC Q335 (ebook) | DDC 006.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021012928 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021012929 International edition ISBN 9780593240717 Ebook ISBN 9780593238301 crownpublishing.com Book design by Edwin Vazquez, adapted for ebook Cover Design: Will Staehle ep_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Introduction by Kai-Fu Lee: The Real Story of AI Introduction by Chen Qiufan: How We Can Learn to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Future with Imagination Chapter One: The Golden Elephant Analysis: Deep Learning, Big Data, Internet/Finance Applications, AI Externalities Chapter Two: Gods Behind the Masks Analysis: Computer Vision, Convolutional Neural Networks, Deepfakes, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Biometrics, AI Security Chapter Three: Twin Sparrows Analysis: Natural Language Processing, Self-Supervised Training, GPT-3, AGI and Consciousness, AI Education Chapter Four: Contactless Love Analysis: AI Healthcare, AlphaFold, Robotic Applications, COVID Automation Acceleration Chapter Five: My Haunting Idol Analysis: Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR), Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), Ethical and Societal Issues Chapter Six: The Holy Driver Analysis: Autonomous Vehicles, Full Autonomy and Smart Cities, Ethical and Social Issues Chapter Seven: Quantum Genocide Analysis: Quantum Computers, Bitcoin Security, Autonomous Weapons and Existential Threat Chapter Eight: The Job Savior Analysis: AI Job Displacement, Universal Basic Income (UBI), What AI Cannot Do, 3Rs as a Solution to Displacement Chapter Nine: Isle of Happiness Analysis: AI and Happiness, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Personal Data, Privacy Computing Using Federated Learning and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) Chapter Ten: Dreaming of Plenitude Analysis: Plenitude, New Economic Models, the Future of Money, Singularity Acknowledgments Other Titles About the Authors What we want is a machine that can learn from experience. —Alan Turing Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Arthur C. Clarke INTRODUCTION BY KAI-FU LEE THE REAL STORY OF AI Artificial intelligence (AI) is smart software and hardware capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. AI is the elucidation of the human learning process, the quantification of the human thinking process, the explication of human behavior, and the understanding of what makes intelligence possible.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

TECHNOLOGY: EVOLUTION BY OTHER MEANS When a scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of technology A machine is as distinctively and brilliantly and expressively human as a violin sonata or a theorem in Euclid. —Gregory Vlastos Technology picks right up with the exponentially quickening pace of evolution.

Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, Peter Molyneux

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, book value, collective bargaining, Colossal Cave Adventure, do what you love, financial engineering, game design, Golden age of television, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shock, pirate software, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, Steve Jobs, Von Neumann architecture

We had developed a very loyal following who knew us by that name, and so the die was cast. Ramsay: What other names did you consider? Weaver: I dabbled with the idea of using a name that incorporated the word “magic” out of respect for Arthur C. Clarke, who said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But, in the end, Bethesda Softworks stuck. Ramsay: Location is important to some businesses. How did you choose the commercial space? Where was it? Weaver: A commercial location became important because the original place where I started the company was my house, which was not zoned for a commercial enterprise.

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

Truth could not be objectively and rationally derived until we had actually made a decision and implemented it. When we guessed wrong, usage dropped and user email increased. "Why can't I change my display font?" people demanded to know. "Isn't this still America?" Arthur C. Clarke once postulated, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Our job on the UI team was to set the stage for the technological marvel that happened whenever someone conducted a search—to make Google's interface supernaturally simple to use. The choices we made may look painfully obvious, but that's a mark of the team's success.

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 by Francis O. French, Colin Burgess, Paul Haney

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, card file, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, Neil Armstrong, out of africa

He did more than fly in space and return safely to the Earth; he saw, he experienced, what was out there. One hopes the first person on Mars has the same gleam in his or her eye, the same thirst for knowledge that Scott Carpenter still shows and shares, more than forty years after his sole journey into space. 6. Heavenly Twins Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Sir Arthur C. Clarke At 11:30 a.m. on 11 August 1962, the seventh person to leave the Earth in a spacecraft was launched into orbit. It was a Soviet national holiday known as Physical Culture Day, and the much-rumored launch was dramatically announced in a special Radio Moscow broadcast to the nation, interrupting regular programs.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

“They all have a common sense of space,” Clarke said, urging Peter, Bob, and Todd to think of students from all languages, nationalities, governments, and ideologies coming together over a shared love of space. “Focus on young people,” he said. He used a line the group loved: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Toward the end of dinner, Peter said, “If you don’t mind, can we call you ‘Uncle Arthur’?” The answer was yes, and soon Uncle Arthur, the prophet of the space age, had signed on to become an adviser to SEDS. — Back in the Man Vehicle Lab at MIT, working with Professor Chuck Oman, Peter affixed adhesive electrode patches to the face of a man he considered royalty—Byron Lichtenberg, test pilot, Vietnam fighter pilot, MIT-trained mechanical engineer and biomedical engineer, and new breed of space traveler.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Figure 7.2 Declining cost of international telephone calls. Compared to 1930 a short trans-Atlantic call is now four orders of magnitude (1/10,000) cheaper. Plotted from data in OECD (2013) and Rodrigue (2017). Arthur C. Clarke’s often cited (and highly perceptive) Third Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Clarke 1962). The claim could be easily repurposed for describing the quality-of-life gains that have resulted from the two centuries, and in many cases from just one century or its fraction, of grand transitions. Typical longevities, levels of income, amenities of quotidian existence, incessant flows of energies, variety of food, ease and affordability of travel, surfeit of virtually cost-free information—all of these gains have been truly magical for two reasons.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Footnote 1 In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “modern bourgeois society… has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, [it] is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” You can’t help but hear Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”—indistinguishable because it benefits elites to keep it that way, because the webs of exploitation are so vast and opaque, and because the final product is, too. WHAT THE LUDDITES WON Scores of Luddites were killed by machine owners and the state. Many more were cast into poverty.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

in 1844, the United States had two thousand miles of sparking, glowing wires carrying messages from Maine to Missouri, Chicago to Savannah. “On the first of January, 1848, of the Christian era,” The New York Herald declared, “the new age of miracles began.” Which was among the greatest illustrations of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But in this book Clarke’s aphorism has a converse meaning as well: technology that seems magical and miraculous can encourage and confirm credulous people’s belief in make-believe magic and miracles. A few months after the Herald announced this new age of miracles, Americans were therefore inclined to believe when a pair of sisters, twelve and fifteen, announced they had communicated with a ghost haunting their house by means of a kind of knock-knocking Morse code.

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, butterfly effect, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, seminal paper, stem cell, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

Asilomar, then, marked the crossing of these pivotal lines. It was a celebration, an appraisal, an assembly, a confrontation, a warning. It began with a speech and ended with a document. It was the graduation ceremony for the new genetics. “Clone or Die” If you know the question, you know half. —Herb Boyer Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Arthur C. Clarke Stan Cohen and Herb Boyer had also gone to Asilomar to debate the future of recombinant DNA. They found the conference irritating—even deflating. Boyer could not bear the infighting and the name-calling; he called the scientists “self-serving” and the meeting a “nightmare.”

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

I enjoyed the delight of my audiences in experiencing apparently impossible transformations of reality. In my teen years, I replaced my parlor magic with technology projects. I discovered that unlike mere tricks, technology does not lose its transcendent power when its secrets are revealed. I am often reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's third law, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Consider J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter stories from this perspective. These tales may be imaginary, but they are not unreasonable visions of our world as it will exist only a few decades from now. Essentially all of the Potter "magic" will be realized through the technologies I will explore in this book.

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Further, in his book The God Delusion, Dawkins wrote: “[T]here are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. … As Arthur C. Clarke put it, in his Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In what sense would they be superhuman but not supernatural? In a very important sense, which goes to the heart of this book. The crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance. Entities that are complex enough to be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process.

The Art of Software Security Assessment: Identifying and Preventing Software Vulnerabilities by Justin Schuh

address space layout randomization, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, bash_history, business logic, business process, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, information retrieval, information security, iterative process, Ken Thompson, loose coupling, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, MVC pattern, off-by-one error, operational security, OSI model, RFC: Request For Comment, slashdot, SQL injection, web application

In particular, we would like to acknowledge Neel Mehta, Halvar Flake, John Viega, and Nishad Herath for their tireless efforts in reviewing and helping to give us technical and organizational direction. We’d also like to thank the entire publishing team at Addison-Wesley for working with us to ensure the highest-quality finished product possible. Part I: Introduction to Software Security Assessment Chapter 1. Software Vulnerability Fundamentals “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke Introduction The average person tends to think of software as a form of technological wizardry simply beyond understanding. A piece of software might have complexity that rivals any physical hardware, but most people never see its wheels spin, hear the hum of its engine, or take apart the nuts and bolts to see what makes it tick.